Cosmic Upgrade - power ideas?

[XEVEN]

7 hours ago, clickrush said:

Hydrogen based power only really scales well with large duplicant populations or by destroying the oxygen w/o pumping it or by using any other power based solution.

You can "simulate" high duplicant population. Set up your gas bridge network so that pressurizing your base/filling your atmo suits takes priority. Any excess O2 is then used to soak up heat from geysers or what have you before it is ultimately destroyed by door crushers or pumped into space. In this way your electrolyzers never shut off, and nor does your supply of hydrogen.

If water is plentiful, so is hydrogen.

[KittenIsAGeek]

9 hours ago, gelat said:

Could you post a picture of your setup?

Here's an example of my setups. 

Spoiler

This one uses flowing oil to cool the air as its produced. The two chambers directly below are for oxygen and hydrogen over-flows, respectively.  The pipes are set up so that hydrogen feeds to the hydrogen generator first, and only if the pipes are stuffed does it go into the buffer chamber, so the gas pump in the hydrogen room only kicks in if the hydrogen generator use exceeds the production rate of the electrolyzers.  The piping looks confusing, but it works.  Its got shunts and feedbacks to keep oxygen and hydrogen from going to the wrong places.

Hot polluted water goes through the sieve to the electrolyzers, keeping the hot water room from overheating.  There's a straight feed from below that uses bridge mechanics to ensure that fresh water only gets used if my hot water room or the sieve quits for some reason.

Spoiler

My power room needs some design work at some point.. Anyway,  at the moment, only the primary of the two hydrogen generators gets the engie's tuneup.  The primary hydrogen generator is controlled by a smart battery set to 80%.  The secondary kicks in at 40%.  Further down I have two coal generators and a petroleum generator.  The coal generators kick in at 70% and the petrol at 25%.  Coal is supplied by hatches and petrol by a leaky oil fisure that was close to my base (and a lonely molten slickster).

[XEVEN]

You need 2 pumps pumping non stop to keep one electrolyzer from bouncing off of high pressure. In fact they need to be basically right next to the electrolyzer to keep it running without ever being overpressurized, even for a moment. I prefer mechanical filter designs for this reason.

Your hydrogen production, and thus your power, is directly proportional to your O2 production. Check your design with end of cycle reports. If one electrolyzer isn't producing around 530kg O2 per cycle, then your design isn't very space efficient, and you're using more electrolyzers to produce the same mass of hydrogen that fewer could.

I'm not saying the above design is bad, it's definitely not getting 530kg O2 per electrolyzer, per cycle though.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

8 minutes ago, XEVEN said:

You need 2 pumps pumping non stop to keep one electrolyzer from bouncing off of high pressure. In fact they need to be basically right next to the electrolyzer to keep it running without ever being overpressurized, even for a moment. I prefer mechanical filter designs for this reason.

I don't try for 100% production from an electrolyzer.  I do however set mine up so that I can continually pipe 500g/s of oxygen per gas pump into my base.  Two electrolyzers and 3 pumps, like my build posted just above, does this just fine.  I've found that the heat is easier to control that way.

[QuQuasar]

6 hours ago, avc15 said:

If you want net positive power from electrolysis try an open air build. The majority of power consumption in most SPOM builds is oxygen circulation+cooling. 

This.

It's kind of ironic coming from me since I designed one of the more popular self-cooled oxygen systems, but the fact of the matter is I never expected the SPOM to even be viable. The Mk I design should give you an idea of just how ridiculous I was expecting a self-cooled system to be.

I surprised myself by making the Mk II design something that was actually viable to build in people's base, and I won't deny it has it's benefits (the lack of externalities is pretty huge), but it's far from an optimal solution. Put simply, my SPOM Mk II design wastes a continual 480 watts unnecessarily pumping out gas. If you just eject the oxygen into the base and siphon off the hydrogen at the ceiling for your power plant, that's free power you can put to other uses.

[avc15]

1 hour ago, XEVEN said:

You need 2 pumps pumping non stop to keep one electrolyzer from bouncing off of high pressure.

You sound like me about 2 months ago

The question of how many pumps to install is less about getting that last bit of production out of your electrolyzers, more about how many parallel gas systems you want to run.

Suppose you've got 2 electrolyzers. Are you going to run 4 pumps? That's 2 parallel gas systems, all the pumps, all the extra electrical circuits, three chains of HVAC, etc. Well, that 2nd air system doesn't actually run at full capacity, so we're back to the original problem.

Do you want an under-utilized electrolyzer, or do you want to build a whole second delivery system that's under-utilized?

Generally under-utilizing the electrolyzer is less wasteful all around. Build the amount of air delivery you need, then build 1 too many electrolyzers. Usually.

 

[beowulf2010]

45 minutes ago, QuQuasar said:

I surprised myself by making the Mk II design something that was actually viable to build in people's base, and I won't deny it has it's benefits (the lack of externalities is pretty huge), but it's far from an optimal solution.

But it's definitely a nice starting point for people to build, learn from and ultimately start making their own systems. I went from your SPOM Mk II to one with a self filling and better circulating cooling room that was completely accessible to building dupes only 2 wider and 3 taller than yours (I called this Beo-SPOM in my head) and am now playing around with scratch designed mechanical filtered pseudo-SPOMs.

So, regardless of overall effectiveness, your SPOM and other's random builds have been invaluable to me. 

[PhailRaptor]

4 hours ago, Oni Noob said:

I don't get it, why you need Fertilizer maker if you got geysers

You don't, anymore.  The Geyser tweaks in Cosmic ensure that every single NatGas Geyser generates approximately enough gas to run a NatGas Gen continuously, assuming you are able to collect the full volume.  The smallest I've seen since Cosmic is one with an adjusted per-second rate of 87 g/s.  So you're all of 3 g short of a NatGas Geyser with 100% uptime.  Which most people don't even seem to want anymore, because Smart Batteries exist for a control mechanism.

Now the only reason to use the Fertilizer Maker is to make Fertilizer.  An application that is....  rather limited.  With Sleet Wheat now using Dirt instead of Fertilizer, the only uses for Fertilizer are the Farming Station (plant food to double growth rate for a cycle) and food for Sage Hatches (still the best source of Coal, 100% mass conversion ratio).  But now that the Fertilizer Maker requires Dirt and Phosphorite in addition to the P-H2O, it's no longer set-and-forget.  You have to actually bring Dirt and Phosphorite to the machine periodically.  And if you haven't set up a usable Drecko Stable yet to actually produce Phosphorite, you're going to run out and be left with infrastructure with no fuel source.

10 hours ago, avc15 said:

If you want net positive power from electrolysis try an open air build.

I've done those in the past, and decided I really don't like them.  For one, you end up needing 2 or 3 of them set up to do the work of a single SPOM, because they overpressurize so easily.  This then further constrains their effectiveness, because they become throttled by the underlying gas spreading speed in the game, something you have no control over.  This then creates another problem, in that you'll have high O2 pressure in the immediate vicinity of the open air system, but it drops off quite quickly from there as you move away.  So to a degree it's a good thing you need more of them, because you will need to place them in a formation around the internal part of your base to ensure you get decent air pressure everywhere.  This then further complicates the spacial relationships of your builds, because you constantly have to be thinking about whether or not you will need another open air build at this point or that point, so how far do I need to move this new construction site over to accommodate that...

Different strokes for different folks and all that, but it's baffling to me how anyone would actually want to use a system like that.

3 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

I surprised myself by making the Mk II design something that was actually viable to build in people's base, and I won't deny it has it's benefits (the lack of externalities is pretty huge), but it's far from an optimal solution. Put simply, my SPOM Mk II design wastes a continual 480 watts unnecessarily pumping out gas. If you just eject the oxygen into the base and siphon off the hydrogen at the ceiling for your power plant, that's free power you can put to other uses.

I would say that the greatest strength of the SPOM is the simple fact that you can assemble one pretty quickly, and basically forget about it while you work on other things.  Even if those other things end up rendering the SPOM obsolete.  And in my experience building them, despite that wasted wattage, they are still power positive.  This makes them a good starting point for setting up your power grid.

[avc15]

53 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Different strokes for different folks and all that, but it's baffling to me how anyone would actually want to use a system like that.

I suppose but it's not really such a big problem. I typically build 4 electrolyzers and spread them around the base, and that's enough. But I'm also not running 30-dupe colonies. Just figure you're only going to get 40-60% capacity from your electrolyzers and plan accordingly.

But the OP asked how to get more power out of electrolysis, this is the single strongest way. There's a downside, of course.

edit: really off-topic and perhaps a bit personal here (but the quote is a bit personal, isn't it?) - beware of speaking in absolutes, folks. This is an engineering game. There are upsides and downsides. If you can't see the upside to either approach, well, build what you like. But don't do ^ that.

[AngryKeyring]

I've got a SPOM that pumps gas, sits borderline positive and drops negative depending on consumption. However that all changes once you get an electrical engineer. Single hydrogen generator powers the whole rig, and builds up enough excess hydrogen to power a second one once every while. The SPOM's power loop has a transformer going to the main power, connected by a NOT output on a smart battery set to 95%/100%. When the SPOM's batteries hit 100%, it dumps about 5% of the capacity into the main grid. 

Main grid, in my current game is powered by multiple power sources. Primarily Four NatGas Generators fed by two vents (One starts at 75% charge, other two at 50% (Slowly accumulating an excess in the pressure tank reserve.) Three Coal Gens, one at 50% and two at 25%. A Petrol Gen, that kicks in at 25%, and a vent fed Hydrogen generator that kicks in at 75% (Though the vent is crap, so its duty cycle is crap). On top of that the SPOM has its power overflow, and four manual generators at Priority 1 for Idling dupes. 

I've got the setup currently attended to by two Elec engineers. One has most priorities dropped besides tinkering.

I have a ton of cooling systems, so I still run out of power at times.

Edit: Forgot I added another NatGas Generator last night.

[SackMaggie]

Just use power shutoff and some automation, You will able to charge main grid and your oxygen build.

[Sevio]

@gelat My go-to design to make a good amount of surplus power with electrolyzers:

You will have to start with a gas filter initially and let the pressure in the gas pump's room build up a bit before you enable the pump, but once stabilized no more oxygen can get into that little room because the hydrogen will always fill the entire top row. Then you can take out the gas filter and send it directly to the hydrogen generator. You can sprinkle a couple of these across your base to keep oxygen pressures high everywhere and save a lot of power by not pumping oxygen at all. But you'll have to get some cooling from an external source eventually.

The atmo switch next to the electrolyzer is not needed but you can use it to (maybe) save a little bit more power by letting the electrolyzer only run when the pressure is low enough.

[XEVEN]

This is your basic O2 design, not optimized for power. Sure, "no pump so more power" seems true, but keeping them running is more important for a power focused design.

[Oozinator]

2 minutes ago, XEVEN said:

This is your basic O2 design, not optimized for power. Sure, "no pump so more power" seems true, but keeping them running is more important for a power focused design.

Invalid argument.
Power focused, should it not mean to generate more, use less?
When you run one pump and one electrolyzer, it will run all the time and will spread heat, additional cooling needed.
In an open system with one electrolyzer and one pump at the top, it will not run all the time, but will heat up too.
In an open system with 50 electrolyzers, every electrolyzer runs only short time, much less heat at one spot and when you store O² you could run your base on hydrogen and nothing will heat up..

[PhailRaptor]

13 minutes ago, XEVEN said:

This is your basic O2 design, not optimized for power. Sure, "no pump so more power" seems true, but keeping them running is more important for a power focused design.

But you don't build Electrolyzors for power.  You build them for Oxygen.  Consuming the Hydrogen for power is akin to recycling the waste products.

3 hours ago, avc15 said:

edit: really off-topic and perhaps a bit personal here (but the quote is a bit personal, isn't it?) - beware of speaking in absolutes, folks. This is an engineering game. There are upsides and downsides. If you can't see the upside to either approach, well, build what you like. But don't do ^ that.

Well, now you're making it personal...  I never said it was bad that people used open air systems.  I merely said I did not understand why anyone would want to use them.  That says nothing about open air systems, or about people that use them.  That says I don't understand.  And now you've twisted that to make me an example of "what not to do".

[XEVEN]

43 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

Invalid argument.
Power focused, should it not mean to generate more, use less?
When you run one pump and one electrolyzer, it will run all the time and will spread heat, additional cooling needed.
In an open system with one electrolyzer and one pump at the top, it will not run all the time, but will heat up too.
In an open system with 50 electrolyzers, every electrolyzer runs only short time, much less heat at one spot and when you store O² you could run your base on hydrogen and nothing will heat up..

50 open air electrolyzers? Ya, no... 

If your focus is power you're consuming or deleting excess O2 (and heat) to keep a steady flow of hydrogen.

Half of the fun is designing cooling systems anyway. Now with access to space, The heat argument is "invalid", friend.

34 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

But you don't build Electrolyzors for power.  You build them for Oxygen.  Consuming the Hydrogen for power is akin to recycling the waste products.

 

I stopped reading here. Read the thread title. While youre at it, read the thread. 

[Sevio]

The OP asked for an early/midgame alternative to coal for making power and mentioned having trouble getting surplus power from hydrogen. For surplus power from hydrogen, as stated before, you need an open air build to make the process efficient enough. Doing this has more than sufficed for my early/midgame power needs until I started needing high power machines like metal refineries, oil refineries and polymer presses.

Yes you can use space to vent excess oxygen (basically same as open air build but oxygen vents to space instead of going into the base) and create even more power from a fixed number of electrolyzers but I wouldn't call something like that early/midgame anymore.

[KittenIsAGeek]

4 hours ago, Sevio said:

For surplus power from hydrogen, as stated before, you need an open air build to make the process efficient enough. 

I disagree.  Certainly the efficiency goes up if you're powering fewer devices, but your actual power production goes down.  If you're wanting to use hydrogen as a power source, then you need to produce more of it.  You only produce more if your electrolyzers aren't over-pressurized -- which means you must do something with the oxygen.  If you can pump out 1000g/s of oxygen and put it somewhere, then you'll produce 126g/s of hydrogen -- enough to keep one hydrogen generator running continually and another running 25% of the time.

With the engy's tune-up, a hydrogen generator produces 1.2kw of power.  Figure 600 watts of power (on average) for running a SPOM (or similar) build and that means you can continually produce an excess 600 watts of power.  When power is demanded, kick on the second generator for an additional 1.2kw of power.

An open-air design is going to be limited by how much oxygen your dupes are breathing, meaning that while you're not using as much power, you're also not generating nearly as much.

[gelat]

Has anyone tried to manage oxygen over pressure with Dense Puft's? 

[avc15]

whatever oxygen you use or delete is matched by a proportionate amount of hydrogen. Your dupes will consume the same amount of oxygen regardless of which system you built. Now, if you're actively deleting oxygen, you probably want a closed system.

Now, I still expect the electrolyzer or energy content of hydrogen to be re-balanced in some way now that the void is so easily accessible  Hydrogen from electrolysis (even in an open air system) should be just a minor offset to the energy cost, not a way to burn water for surplus power.

 

[Yunru]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

An open-air design is going to be limited by how much oxygen your dupes are breathing, meaning that while you're not using as much power, you're also not generating nearly as much.

Ah but with space, you now have a last resort venting place.

[chemie]

3 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Ah but with space, you now have a last resort venting place.

Not even last resort.  Build your power system in space and void the o2 without pumps...free power except for water cost

[Yunru]

14 minutes ago, chemie said:

Not even last resort.  Build your power system in space and void the o2 without pumps...free power except for water cost

But the hydrogen floats above the oxygen. Unless we build at the top of a biome so it vents sideways into space?

[chemie]

Just now, Yunru said:

But the hydrogen floats above the oxygen. Unless we build at the top of a biome so it vents sideways into space?

Wallpaper the electro and h2 pump

[KittenIsAGeek]

14 minutes ago, chemie said:

Not even last resort.  Build your power system in space and void the o2 without pumps...free power except for water cost

I suppose with wallpaper available now you could set something up that would keep the hydrogen without the oxygen.. Hmmm.