Liquid Separated Electrolysis

[ZanthraSW]

I was thinking about how gas vents can be placed in a small amount of water in order to make them operate no matter the gas pressure, and I was wondering if the same thing applied to electrolyzers. I did some experementation and it does, but it takes a bit more effort to get it to work properly. As it turns out, the electrolyzer does not check all the times it is allowed to output to for pressure, but only checks the four tiles it occupies. Filling each of those tiles with a small amount of liquid allows it to operate full time, except that the electrolyzer can displace a liquid to place a gas.

Someone recently posted this about gas pump range. Electrolyzers produce their outputs at range 2 from the upper left tile.

I have observed that elecrtolyzers have the same pattern rotated 90 degrees clockwise, except for producing gas instead of consuming. That means that the tile just above the left column of the electrolyzer and the tile just to the left of the top row of the electrolyzer are valid points to produce gas. To avoid the electrolyzer displacing any liquid, those two tiles should be preloaded with hydrogen and oxygen, and they need to be protected from exposure to other gases. 

Once in place, these electrolyzers will happily run forever, producing vast quantities of pressurized hydrogen and oxygen for your experiments.

If building manually, make sure to pump everything but hydrogen out of the top chamber before turning on the electrolyzers (a hard vacuum is fine). Once that is done, pumping hydrogen out is very safe as long as the airflow tile has oxygen in it. (The atmo sensor pictured in the hydrogen chamber is unnecessary).

You could make a few changes to this design. One thing would be to place a liquid airlock to the right of the hydrogen chamber to provide maintenance access, but I would recommend atmo suits first, since even a single breath of CO2 in the hydrogen chamber will probably get stuck in one of the electrolyzer output tiles, when that happens, it could start displacing liquid to create the hydrogen, and then even worse, if the hydrogen trades places with the oxygen in the airflow tile, it has no way out.

If you do end up with a light gas stuck in the top airflow tile, then you can shut off the electrolyzers, remove the full tile above it, rebuild and vacuum the chamber again. If it's a regular occurrence, you can replace those tiles with mechanical airlocks, but I would suggest avoiding the problem anyways as it takes a long time to create the vacuum in the hydrogen chamber.

One gas pump can handle about 4.4 electrolyzers of hydrogen. It can be expanded to any number of electrolyzers,

The liquids you use don't really matter, but my initial thoughts were that oil and petroleum would be less likely to displace than water.

For automation, I have a switch to set the pump to always on, or an atmo sensor to maintain a certian pressure in the hydrogen chamber. On the oxygen side, a switch is set up with an and gate to allow the electrolyzers to be disabled, or enabled when O2 pressure drops below some ammount.

Cautions:

Letting these supply your base with O2 directly is likely to produce popped eardrums anywhere near the oxygen output.

Polluted water produces polluted O2 which may interfere, further experementation needed.

Do not allow gases other than hydrogen into the upper chamber.

Do not allow gases lighter than oxygen to flow up into the airflow tiles.

 

[Grimgaw]

Some of us known that for more than a year. It's worth noting that this trick doesn't gain you anything, and has potential to be harmful with 'popped eardrums'.

[ZanthraSW]

Ah yeah. That works on the same idea. I had done a bunch of searches for electrolyzer builds, but could not find any that used liquid to counter the max gas pressure issue which constantly plagued even my best standard electrolyser builds. With good automation and some gas pumps to help distribute the pressure better, the popped eardrumbs can be avoided to some extent, but the more pumps you use for O2 the less energy efficient it is. This is really good for making large Hydrogen and O2 stockpiles for things like large cooling projects or other Science!

[Soulwind]

It's a lot harder now that it used to be.  Used to be all you had to do was drip in a full bottle of polluted water and then a full bottle of clean water and the electrolyzer would easily run forever, and easily separate the H2/O2 with just 2 air tiles.  I built a couple of oxygen rooms using that exploit.  After the Rancher Mark 1 changes though, the electrolyzer wants to flood out instead of running and if you lower the liquid amount then it tends to move around and ruin the self-separation of gasses.

I've not tried it with oil and water, so maybe that works better. 

These days I'm working on perfecting an exploit free (other than the 1 gas per tile game mechanic) method of doing the same thing.  Does require more electrolyzers as they will periodically overpressurize, but in the long run I think it evens out on water and power usage.

 

[The Flying Fox]

Yeah, I had one of these back in the thermal update.  The days when every joule of power counted!

 

 

It's interesting to find out, after all this time, that the weirdness of how pumps work is why this, in fact, functions.  As you can see, the hydrogen doesn't have to be coming out of the top at all but can come out from the sides as well.  You can even have the electrolzyer produce only one of the gases, if you want, by blocking one of these outputs, effectively destroying the gas. 

 

This does mirror my experience with the electrolyzer too.  The preferred side for hydrogen to come out of the unit seems to be the top left and oxygen on the right side of the unit.  Perhaps, code-wise, there's actually two "pumps" that the electrolyzer is made out of; one for hydrogen, the other oxygen.  One on the left and one on the right side respectively.

 

The other thing to note is that running the electrolyzer like this should be more power efficient in the long run.  As the electrolyzer tends to run at 333 Grams/Sec or 666 Grams/Sec when the room is over 1KG.. yet still takes 120 Watts to run.

[ZanthraSW]

For the actual locations the gas can be emitted from I feel needs more research. Seeing the other designs shows me I did tests that would show true if my hypothesis was correct, and they did, so I assumed it was correct. I thought maybe it's the range 2 like pumps, at the upper left, so I tried placing the hydrogen and oxygen filled tiles in the upper left corner and it worked. So it's correct right?  The real test would be to find a pair of hydrogen and oxygen tiles adjacent to any side of the electrolyzer which it won't output to. It may be as simple as the electrolyzer can output in any adjacent tile.

Still it's the idea that the objects check pressure in a certain area to detect if they are overpressure or flooded or in the proper medium, and then interacts in a different range. Pumps, Gas Vents, and Electrolyzers all share that property. And even if you use the fact that the game only allows one gas per tile, you are still taking advantage of that fact by controlling what's in the detection range to allow it to interact beyond it's normal limits.

Also when I was first experementing with the electrolyzer setup, I found that there were some very strange things that would happen if it did not have a valid place to put the hydrogen and oxygen. It tries to displace the liquid from the upper left tile (which is what lead me to thinking the upper left was the source), and if the liquid to be displaced has nowhere to go, such as if the bottom layer is crude oil and top layer is water and petroleum side by side all surrounded by airflow tiles, a small amount of the liquid is just deleted until the space is free.

[Grimgaw]

10 hours ago, ZanthraSW said:

but the more pumps you use for O2 the less energy efficient it is.

 

7 hours ago, The Flying Fox said:

The other thing to note is that running the electrolyzer like this should be more power efficient in the long run.  As the electrolyzer tends to run at 333 Grams/Sec or 666 Grams/Sec when the room is over 1KG.. yet still takes 120 Watts to run.

And this is where people miss the point. Electrolyzer at max pressure doesn't consume power or water (at all), so instead of adding gas pumps add more elctrolyzers and make sure the gas pumps are moving 500g packets and you literally hit maximum power efficiency.

The 333g/s, 666g/s you see is average over game ticks per second.

[Carnis]

This is useful, thank you.

My current electrolyzer system suffers from slight underpressure with 2 of its 4 electrolyzers. Even with 2electrolyzers/2.5pumps = 2kg/1.25kg, so the electrolyzers are working at under 60% capacity. This will solve that, and save space too.

[ZanthraSW]

2 hours ago, Grimgaw said:

 

And this is where people miss the point. Electrolyzer at max pressure doesn't consume power or water (at all), so instead of adding gas pumps add more elctrolyzers and make sure the gas pumps are moving 500g packets and you literally hit maximum power efficiency.

The 333g/s, 666g/s you see is average over game ticks per second.

If you have a base with good airflow, then you can set the atmo sensor on the O2 side to below 3.5kg (or locate an atmo sensor in the closest area you want to avoid popped eardrums and adjust according to delay of the pressure wavefront), and let the air pressure distribute the O2 throughout your base without pumping at all. At that O2 pressure it's pretty safe to pump from the high pressure zone direct to exosuit docks without filtering as most other gases will be pushed away from the area, and tough corners or enclosed regions of the base can be pumped to if nescessary. This is not much more energy efficient than open air electrolyzers, and is more complex to build, but it is easier to pipe for, and may provide better O2 distribution in some cases due to the higher pressure. It also allows your base to be expanded upwards without having to relocate the H2 processing equipment as it's separated and stored as it's produced.

 

[Kabrute]

I used to use doors as a flutter baffle on my Industrial Lox processor, very effective.

[Carnis]

I tested it in debug mode like so:

With liquid displacement by oxygen its very pesky to setup, eg you need perfect vacuum at top and no hydrogen at the airflow tiles on the sides.

But once running your submerged electrolyzers

a) run full time

b) there are no deleted (hydrogen) gas packets, a common issue with open air electrolyzers

the end result is you overproduce hydrogen. Very effective, might transition in towards it.

[SackMaggie]

I would prefer this

[KittenIsAGeek]

... So I built a thing.  So far it appears to be working nicely.  My layout needs some work, but its not bad for a rough draft.

It runs off two transformers -- one for cooling, one for producing oxygen.  I've got room for more gas pumps when I grow into them.  The polluted water reservoir pump feeds into  water sieve that provides water for the electrolyzers, so it never gets too warm.  The temp sensors close the doors to keep the oxygen production at around 18c. When it was initially filling up with O2, it produced enough hydrogen to run 3 generators.  Which, even without the engy's tune-up, is more than the power it takes to run everything.

It should theoretically provide oxygen for 26 dupes once I build more pumps.  And find a water source.  And get more dupes.  Anyway.  

TL;DR:  It makes lots of cool oxygen.  Yay!

[Soulwind]

The one real problem I see with that setup is with polluted water on top, you'll be getting some offgassing resulting in contamination of your gasses with po2 and eventually mass loss of the water.  Unless you keep the pressure over 1800g asst all times. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

1 hour ago, Soulwind said:

The one real problem I see with that setup is with polluted water on top, you'll be getting some offgassing resulting in contamination of your gasses with po2 and eventually mass loss of the water.  Unless you keep the pressure over 1800g asst all times. 

That's petroleum not polluted water on top.  And because of the exploit, both the hydrogen and oxygen chambers are usually over 2kg.  That's the main difference between this and my usual build: Pressures are high instead of very very low.