Hydrogen getting deleted in my electrolyzer build?

[BlueLance]

1 hour ago, Capsup said:

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?

Neither tbh, I don't ever cool the oxygen down, the furthest i went was cycle 648 and it was only hovering about the high 40 degrees. As it flowed further down it gets cooler obviously. Sure eventually it would heat up my entire base, but considering how long it takes and how easy it would be to cool it I am not really worried.

[KittenIsAGeek]

15 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.

When you trick out the electrolyzer with liquids such that the electrolyzer has 100% up-time and the gasses are sorted right at the source, you get the correct ratios of oxygen and hydrogen.  With one electrolyzer you can run a hydrogen generator 100% while slowly getting excess hydrogen.  

Most designs will not achieve 100% up time.  A single pump may have a throughput of 500g/s, but it can only send one gas at a time.  Even with the recent changes to how they operate, this still causes hiccups where your average rate will be lower than you expect.  In mixed-gas configurations, oxygen will always have the priority since there is a lot more of it. 

Finally, when the electrolyzer outputs the gasses, it first generates the oxygen. Then it tries to find someplace to produce the hydrogen.  If your pressures are too high, the small amount of hydrogen doesn't have anywhere to go and gets destroyed.

I also get the correct ratios with a setup that  mechanically sorts the gasses.  I don't get 100% operation time on my electrolyzer, however, so I throw in a second mirror copy.  Combined I get 1000g/s of oxygen and 126g/s of hydrogen.

Spoiler

The red area is hydrogen, the blue is oxygen.  The central pump is set to come on at a gas pressure of 600g.  The oxygen pumps are set to run continually.

 

[ZanthraSW]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

...

Finally, when the electrolyzer outputs the gasses, it first generates the oxygen. Then it tries to find someplace to produce the hydrogen.  If your pressures are too high, the small amount of hydrogen doesn't have anywhere to go and gets destroyed.

...

I don't think this is correct. I believe that each tick electrolyzer produce hydrogen first. Placing the hydrogen does not care how much pressure there is, just the electrolyzer operation does. If it cannot find a valid tile to place the hydrogen (a vacuum or tile that already contains hydrogen) it will attempt to displace another gas or liquid. This displacement causes liquids and gasses to attempt to combine with neighbors to make room for the new gas. If it still does not have room the gas disappears.

In my test example earlier in this thread, I observed that the electrolyzer have very low chance of going overpressure. I believe that this is due to the lack of disruptive displacement when it does not have a location to place the hydrogen. This displacement may be a major cause of overpressure tiles detected by the electrolyzer. It might be worth experimenting with more in builds like open air electrolyzers by placing 3 tiles to build a hydrogen bubble above each electrolyzer to reduce displacement disruption.

[Yunru]

5 hours ago, martosss said:

too low pressure = pumps inefficient => power inefficient

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

That's the point. You don't have high pressure, you just don't have you buffer directly above the electrolyzer.

[PhailRaptor]

8 hours ago, Capsup said:

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.

It's the entire premise of the "flooded electrolyzer" exploit.  Leave only 2 open tiles adjacent to the Electrolyzer, 1 with Hydrogen and 1 with Oxygen.  Then use ~200 kg per tile of 2 different liquids to fill the 4 tiles of the Electrolyzer itself, so that gas can't flow there (tile occupied) but not enough mass to consider it "flooded" and non-functional.  The Oxygen that is created will automagically fill into the open tile that has Oxygen already, while the Hydrogen created will also automagically fill into the open tile that already has Hydrogen.

And yes, it's an exploit, because it makes use of very much intended game mechanics (1 substance per tile, like gases combining) for a very unintended result (power free, near zero space, 100% effective gas sorting).  I'm sure it will be fixed at some point.

[Carnis]

6 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

And yes, it's an exploit, because it makes use of very much intended game mechanics (1 substance per tile, like gases combining) for a very unintended result (power free, near zero space, 100% effective gas sorting).  I'm sure it will be fixed at some point.

And still, it produces less electricity than a 4 tile space electrolyzer inside your habitation Block, with no pumps & liquidlooping coolingpipes.

[KittenIsAGeek]

28 minutes ago, Carnis said:

And still, it produces less electricity than a 4 tile space electrolyzer inside your habitation Block, with no pumps & liquidlooping coolingpipes.

Personally, I don't like running electrolyzers in an open configuration. They do work just fine that way, but I dislike packets of hydrogen drifting in my base.  I also prefer to control exactly where my air goes.

[ZanthraSW]

13 hours ago, ZanthraSW said:

In my test example earlier in this thread, I observed that the electrolyzer have very low chance of going overpressure. I believe that this is due to the lack of disruptive displacement when it does not have a location to place the hydrogen. This displacement may be a major cause of overpressure tiles detected by the electrolyzer. It might be worth experimenting with more in builds like open air electrolyzers by placing 3 tiles to build a hydrogen bubble above each electrolyzer to reduce displacement disruption.

I did some further experementation with this, and it seems that for open air electrolyzers, adding a hydrogen bubble above them will prevent deleted hydrogen packets, but will not help to reduce the pressure turbulance from displacement. I am wondering whether when H2 is deleted, it also deletes a corresponding amount of O2, but to test that, I need to reenable debug mode so I can accurately measure changes in gas volume over many tiles.

[NanoD]

1 hour ago, ZanthraSW said:

 I am wondering whether when H2 is deleted, it also deletes a corresponding amount of O2, but to test that, I need to reenable debug mode so I can accurately measure changes in gas volume over many tiles.

When I did find that hydrogen was deleted I did lots of testing. It seams for some reason oxygen is not delete or only in small quantities. 

[BlueLance]

2 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Personally, I don't like running electrolyzers in an open configuration. They do work just fine that way, but I dislike packets of hydrogen drifting in my base.  I also prefer to control exactly where my air goes.

My design is set so that there is no packets of hydrogen floating about, i hate having anything but Oxygen and Co2 in my base!

[NanoD]

19 hours ago, martosss said:

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?

Average up-time deepens much on what setting you put on the sensors. at 800 grams on the senor the up time is 88,7 %

and with 600 grams on the sensor it is 98 %. Now I remember why I did use 600 on the sensors

Yeah it will achieve perfect split but like a some stated you need to prime the system. And it will work perfekt until you have blocked hydrogen line.

[Angpaur]

Recently I was also doing some experiments with electrolyzers builds and I found some strange differences between to builds, which were looking quite the same but one of them was providing more space to electrolyzer on sides.

Below build was able to produce total of 17,6kg of excess hydrogen:

Spoiler

While this build with airflows to the side of electrolyzer produced less of excess hydrogen (11,6kg):

Spoiler

So looks like some hydrogen deletion occured when there was more space for electrolyzer. The differences in used power to run electrolyzer full time cannot explain the difference in hydrogen generation.

So I think we need to avoid in electrolyzer builds giving more space to the machine, as this is causing hydrogen packets to be deleted.

[martosss]

Just now, NanoD said:

Average up-time deepens much on what setting you put on the sensors. at 800 grams on the senor the up time is 88,7 %

and with 600 grams on the sensor it is 98 %. Now I remember why I did use 600 on the sensors

Yeah it will achieve perfect split but like a some stated you need to prime the system. And it will work perfekt until you have blocked hydrogen line.

If that's true then this system is better than mine, because it uses less space for the same effect I have to test it. Thanks for the info.