Hydrogen getting deleted in my electrolyzer build?

[Capsup]

Hey everyone.

So I made the following simple electrolyzer build, just combining 4 electrolyzers, optimized for max gas throughput (to hopefully pull out as much power as possible with the hydrogen):

It's pretty simple. I'm using a mechanical filter with a long buffer to passively filter out the hydrogen and just discarding the oxygen, atleast for now (the hydrogen loop valve is set to 100g/s):

and it works well. It has had a 99% throughput efficiency, atleast for oxygen, for atleast 10 cycles now:

However, I can't seem to run 4 hydrogen generators as I would otherwise expect from this build and the oxygen numbers. I can only run 3 indefinitely, while the fourth turns on every once in a while:

I've tried just giving it some extra hydrogen in debug mode to see if it's just a matter of having a buffer, but as can be seen above, that buffer dissapeared quite quickly.

My question is this:
What's happening here? Is my system deleting hydrogen somewhere? And in which case, where? The hydrogen output of the build above just goes directly to the 4 hydrogen generators, there's nothing in-between.

[Promethien]

I am almost certain the Electrolyzer doesn't produce as much hydrogen as the tooltip says or the amounts listed on the tooltips of the Electrolyzer and Hydrogen Generator aren't using the same time increment. If they were then a single generator wouldn't be able to keep up with a single Electrolyzer but I have set up full flow Electrolyzers that couldn't keep a single generator running full time.

Edit: Yes people, I have been corrected. Quoting me on the second page after I have been corrected is silly.

[ZanthraSW]

Try making a free tile above your electrolyser for hyrdrogen to accumulate in. Due to it being lighter than O2, it should not get displaced, and it should always leave a valid tile for the elecrolyser to put it's hydrogen output.

Here is a quick example with the protected H2 tile above the electrolyser.

[PhailRaptor]

The problem is most likely in your Electrolyzer room itself.  The way the Electrolyzer works is that it creates the O2 first, which has a markedly higher mass than the H2.  This can (and often does) result in deletion of the H2 that would otherwise be created, since it has nowhere to go (too much O2 pressure).

You will need to expand the size of your Electrolyzer room to avoid this.

[Lifegrow]

You will only get anywhere near the tooltip output if you are keeping the pressure around the electrolyzers very low constantly.

That means moving gasses immediately, and allowing for no pump inactivity (with a minimum of 2 pumps per electrolyzer) - only then will you get somewhere near the 9:1(ish) ratio.

That being said, if in order to achieve this you're moving gasses to a storage chamber for re-handling later, then you kind of run your power efficiency into the dirt.

TL;DR - don't worry about your electrolyzers efficiency  

[Carnis]

Open Air electrolyzer would save 2kW in pumps.

[Sevio]

IMHO trying to achieve maximum throughput on an electrolyzer (especially if your goal is power) is a trap. With open-air electrolyzers, for much less space and power you can increase your throughput simply by putting down another electrolyzer where you need the oxygen pressure instead of pumping it to where you need it. And if you want to discard oxygen so you can overproduce hydrogen, there's no better place to build an open-air electrolyzer than next to space. Or give your dupes some fluffy longhair slicksters.

[Grimgaw]

@capsup It's not working for you because your pumps are on non stop. That's it.

[Oozinator]

@Capsup From my point of view it's complete useless design.
You have to fight heat and get nothing for it, aside a compact design.
Tooltip not precise in your case..
9 pumps for 4 eles. I run one pump for 25 eles.

[BlueLance]

I run 1 pump per electrolyzer, but I have them set to 500g each so they hardly ever run.

[martosss]

15 hours ago, Capsup said:

Hey everyone.

So I made the following simple electrolyzer build, just combining 4 electrolyzers, optimized for max gas throughput (to hopefully pull out as much power as possible with the hydrogen)

Let's start with your goal - max gas throughput in order to get max power from the H2.

• In your build your pumps will draw many small packets of O2/H2. That will decrease your power efficiency. You need to separate gases using space and not Mechanical filters - that will save you power.
• Additionally, you have all pumps gathering H2 in 1 place and then 1 more pump sucking it up into the H2 generators - that's 1 superfluous pump in my eyes.

Without using water vent hacks to force low pressure and 100% up-time, I'm pretty sure you'll need more space to get those Ele-s bubbling 90⁺% of the time. Even with water hacks, you'll not be power efficient if you suck small packets.

[Angpaur]

6 minutes ago, martosss said:

Without using water vent hacks to force low pressure and 100% up-time, I'm pretty sure you'll need more space to get those Ele-s bubbling 90⁺% of the time.

In fact it doesn't need very much of more space. Below set up works at max electrolyzer performance:

[NanoD]

Here is my set up I always use in some variation of it. It is a design that I found that didnt delete any hydrogen and sins then I have stuck with it. 

Atmo sensors is set to 800. 600 works fine to.   

 

[BlueLance]

28 minutes ago, NanoD said:

Here is my set up I always use in some variation of it. It is a design that I found that didnt delete any hydrogen and sins then I have stuck with it. 

Atmo sensors is set to 800. 600 works fine to.   

 

Similar to my design, just increase the height of the electrolyzer by one, and remove everything below. BOOM!

[martosss]

3 hours ago, Angpaur said:

In fact it doesn't need very much of more space. Below set up works at max electrolyzer performance:

So you're telling me the top pump is pumping either 500g of O2, or 500g of H2 and nothing else 100% of the time? I don't believe you. You will overpressure at some point, because your top pump will finish the H2 and start pumping O2. You need at least 3 pumps to take care of all the gases.

Maybe that number is 532.8kg because of Oxylite ... or in the previous cycle you filled the chamber with O2 that you couldn't pump and in this cycle you pumped it. Regardless, it's theoretically not possible to pump all the gases with only 2 pumps.

Not to mention that it will be energy inefficient because of the top pump not pumping full packets all the time.

3 hours ago, NanoD said:

Here is my set up I always use in some variation of it. It is a design that I found that didnt delete any hydrogen and sins then I have stuck with it. 

Atmo sensors is set to 800. 600 works fine to.   

 

 

This is nice, I'm curious what the average up-time of the electrolyzer is.

Also do you achieve perfect split of gases or you need filtering on the top pump?

 

[Promethien]

@martosss I just made NanoD's set up to try it and its absolutely flawless. No filtering needed and pushes enough hydrogen to keep a generator running 100% of the time. Uses far less power than it generates too because of the air pumps toggling off a lot.

It does need to be primed though. Don't run the hydrogen pump until the top layer of the room is hydrogen.

[BlueLance]

15 minutes ago, martosss said:

So you're telling me the top pump is pumping either 500g of O2, or 500g of H2 and nothing else 100% of the time? I don't believe you. You will overpressure at some point, because your top pump will finish the H2 and start pumping O2. You need at least 3 pumps to take care of all the gases.

Once the system has a layer of hydrogen on the top the oxygen never displaces it. I have been using the same set up on all my bases so about 5000 cycles of it, The only time a problem occurs is if you have a backup in the hydrogen pipe.

So I assume if he is using pumps versus my open bottom method it is the exact same, it will remain like that and produce o2 as long as there is space at the bottom.

[Angpaur]

50 minutes ago, martosss said:

So you're telling me the top pump is pumping either 500g of O2, or 500g of H2 and nothing else 100% of the time? I don't believe you. You will overpressure at some point, because your top pump will finish the H2 and start pumping O2. You need at least 3 pumps to take care of all the gases.

Maybe that number is 532.8kg because of Oxylite ... or in the previous cycle you filled the chamber with O2 that you couldn't pump and in this cycle you pumped it. Regardless, it's theoretically not possible to pump all the gases with only 2 pumps.

Not to mention that it will be energy inefficient because of the top pump not pumping full packets all the time.

No oxylite or other sources of oxygen on this test map.

Top pump is pumping whatever it can pump at a moment - packet's sizes are differtent each second. This is inefficiency, I know, but this set up is still being able to self power. Another downside is smaller excees hydrogen then it should produce - probably some gas deletion is occuring.

So it is not the best build you can do, but it is a build that can work at full performance without any exploits and with a little space needed.

I just showed it as a curiosity, not viable solution

[martosss]

12 minutes ago, Promethien said:

@martosss I just made NanoD's set up to try it and its absolutely flawless. No filtering needed and pushes enough hydrogen to keep a generator running 100% of the time. Uses far less power than it generates too because of the air pumps toggling off a lot.

It does need to be primed though. Don't run the hydrogen pump until the top layer of the room is hydrogen.

It's usually a trade off - keeping the chamber pressure low for max ele-up-time vs keeping the pressure high enough so that pumps suck in 500g all the time.

If you constantly switch them off and on I think it's bad, because the last suction before they're switched off by automation is usually cut off, so  <500g. It's the same if you switch off power transformers with smart batteries - you lose the 1kW charge that the transformer keeps inside. Here you don't lose gas, but it's not pumped. Therefore, it would be nice if they pumped longer, but full packets, then stopped to restore pressure. You need a bit more space for this though, because if you have little space the ele. will overpressure from time to time.

7 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Once the system has a layer of hydrogen on the top the oxygen never displaces it. I have been using the same set up on all my bases so about 5000 cycles of it, The only time a problem occurs is if you have a backup in the hydrogen pipe.

So I assume if he is using pumps versus my open bottom method it is the exact same, it will remain like that and produce o2 as long as there is space at the bottom.

That layer of H2 will be sucked up by the top pump if you have no automation and then the pump will start sucking O2, then H2, then O2 again and so on... Pressure will rise because the electrolyzer  is producing gas at 1kg/s(supposedly 100% up time) and the pumps are pumping less than 1kg/sec ( specifically the top pump alternating between O2 and H2). So assuming the top pump is pumping 200g of H2 and then 500g of O2, your pressure will rise by 300g/2sec, so you're running at 85% Ele-efficiency at best. Actually it's worse, because that pump will produce many smaller packets.

@Promethien, Priming would be easy since you have the automation built in, so you can manually increase the pressure on the top atmo sensor until you have enough H2 and then decrease it - no dupes required.

[BlueLance]

1 minute ago, martosss said:

That layer of H2 will be sucked up by the top pump if you have no automation and then the pump will start sucking O2, then H2, then O2 again and so on... Pressure will rise because the electrolyzer  is producing gas at 1kg/s(supposedly 100% up time) and the pumps are pumping less than 1kg/sec ( specifically the top pump alternating between O2 and H2). So assuming the top pump is pumping 200g of H2 and then 500g of O2, your pressure will rise by 300g/2sec, so you're running at 85% Ele-efficiency at best. Actually it's worse, because that pump will produce many smaller packets.

If you look he has an atmo sensor, and so do I. So it will never suck up all of the Hydrogen, my cut off is at 500g because I am not too worry about it sucking up a single packet that is less than 500g. I could increase it to 600g or up to 1kg it doesn't matter as much as long as it allows the buffer to remain there and that you are not sucking up lots of small packets.

8 minutes ago, martosss said:

It's usually a trade off - keeping the chamber pressure low for max ele-up-time vs keeping the pressure high enough so that pumps suck in 500g all the time.

There is a third option, have more than one electrolyzer ignore the fact that they wont be running constantly, gain lots of power. Make use of automation to minimise power wastage

[martosss]

2 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

If you look he has an atmo sensor, and so do I. So it will never suck up all of the Hydrogen, my cut off is at 500g because I am not too worry about it sucking up a single packet that is less than 500g. I could increase it to 600g or up to 1kg it doesn't matter as much as long as it allows the buffer to remain there and that you are not sucking up lots of small packets.

I'm sorry, I was looking at Angpaur's picture

4 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

There is a third option, have more than one electrolyzer ignore the fact that they wont be running constantly, gain lots of power. Make use of automation to minimise power wastage

That's true, it doesn't matter if you have 1 or 10. However, the pumps will waste power if sucking <500g. Also you'll need to provide more Wattage temporarily when both ele-s are running, so you need to think about the power grid in that case. Currently I'm running on normal wire and using 2 transformers, but I have to change that .. 1 transformer is more than enough to handle 2-3 power grids if you use smart batteries and some smart switching. That way you can have normal wires everywhere except for the Power transformer-generators, where you need high wattage if 2 or more generators are connected. The other option is 1 power transformer per generator and you can have normal wires there, too. I have to make a tutorial about it. The main thing is that you can exploit batteries - they don't count as consumers and charging them remotely with a normal wire isn't counted as consumption.

[BlueLance]

11 minutes ago, martosss said:

I'm sorry, I was looking at Angpaur's picture

Accidents happen XD

11 minutes ago, martosss said:

However, the pumps will waste power if sucking <500g.

Automation and trial and error are key!! I reckon if it is set at 700g it will probably never pull a packet less than 500g but again a little wastage isn't a killer but it is a waste

[Yunru]

39 minutes ago, martosss said:

It's usually a trade off - keeping the chamber pressure low for max ele-up-time vs keeping the pressure high enough so that pumps suck in 500g all the time.

Not really? You're output and intake are the same, so it's just the space you assign for a buffer.

[martosss]

4 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Not really? You're output and intake are the same, so it's just the space you assign for a buffer.

too low pressure = pumps inefficient => power inefficient

too high pressure = electrolyzer  inefficient => slower O2/H2 generation => space waste(since you're using space inefficiently).

[Capsup]

14 hours ago, Promethien said:

I am almost certain the Electrolyzer doesn't produce as much hydrogen as the tooltip says or the amounts listed on the tooltips of the Electrolyzer and Hydrogen Generator aren't using the same time increment. If they were then a single generator wouldn't be able to keep up with a single Electrolyzer but I have set up full flow Electrolyzers that couldn't keep a single generator running full time.

I mean, that's what these results could indicate, but usually there's a simpler explanation. Occams razor and all that.

 

11 hours ago, ZanthraSW said:

Try making a free tile above your electrolyser for hyrdrogen to accumulate in. Due to it being lighter than O2, it should not get displaced, and it should always leave a valid tile for the elecrolyser to put it's hydrogen output.

Here is a quick example with the protected H2 tile above the electrolyser.

 

11 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

The problem is most likely in your Electrolyzer room itself.  The way the Electrolyzer works is that it creates the O2 first, which has a markedly higher mass than the H2.  This can (and often does) result in deletion of the H2 that would otherwise be created, since it has nowhere to go (too much O2 pressure).

You will need to expand the size of your Electrolyzer room to avoid this.

Both of these does make a lot of sense if that's how the electrolyzer works, technically. So the assumption here is that if an electrolyzer can't output its' hydrogen to an available tile, it will just be removed. I'll try to work with that idea in mind.

 

11 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

You will only get anywhere near the tooltip output if you are keeping the pressure around the electrolyzers very low constantly.

That means moving gasses immediately, and allowing for no pump inactivity (with a minimum of 2 pumps per electrolyzer) - only then will you get somewhere near the 9:1(ish) ratio.

That being said, if in order to achieve this you're moving gasses to a storage chamber for re-handling later, then you kind of run your power efficiency into the dirt.

TL;DR - don't worry about your electrolyzers efficiency  

Definitely. I don't intend to run the gas to a storage chamber. The initial build I posted was just a fun idea I had and I wanted to see where I could take it. None of the pumps do ever go inactive, however the electrolyzers does go overpressure for the tiniest of moments every once in a while, which points towards some kind of inefficiency in the system. With the 2 replies above, it makes a lot of sense that it is happening because of the fact, that a pump switches between O2 then H2 and then back to O2, allowing H2 to be deleted in the process.

 

7 hours ago, Sevio said:

IMHO trying to achieve maximum throughput on an electrolyzer (especially if your goal is power) is a trap. With open-air electrolyzers, for much less space and power you can increase your throughput simply by putting down another electrolyzer where you need the oxygen pressure instead of pumping it to where you need it. And if you want to discard oxygen so you can overproduce hydrogen, there's no better place to build an open-air electrolyzer than next to space. Or give your dupes some fluffy longhair slicksters.

Indeed. The initial build I posted was a whacky experiment that I wanted to start optimising as soon as I had a "baseline" to work from. However, the problem has always been how to get rid of excess oxygen. My own idea was just to pump it into a overpressurized oxygen tank, but your idea of just pumping it into a vacuum / space or a pit of longhair slicksters seems really interesting (especially because it can be done with open-air builds), not something I've considered before. To debug mode! 

 

7 hours ago, Grimgaw said:

@capsup It's not working for you because your pumps are on non stop. That's it.

/thread

I appreciate everyone's thoughts, information and good ideas. Learning to play this game is a lot of fun and interacting with the community has been a blessing so far. Keep on just being you, ONI community!

1 hour ago, BlueLance said:

Once the system has a layer of hydrogen on the top the oxygen never displaces it. I have been using the same set up on all my bases so about 5000 cycles of it, The only time a problem occurs is if you have a backup in the hydrogen pipe.

So I assume if he is using pumps versus my open bottom method it is the exact same, it will remain like that and produce o2 as long as there is space at the bottom.

Do you then use another cooling solution to cool down the hot oxygen coming out of the electrolyzer in the rest of your base? Or do you cool the oxygen as part of the open-air electrolyzer build?