Pre-Space Liquid Hydrogen Generator

[Zarquan]

DISCLAIMER:  This is a prototype.  A proof of concept.  I built it in debug (though I could have built it in game) and it took a long time to actually produce liquid hydrogen that was usable.  But the concept is sound and I feel this is interesting. 

I did not measure performance or how long it actually took to produce liquid hydrogen (I left it running after a while and when I came back, I had liquid hydrogen)  I believe the first liquid hydrogen came out around 20 cycles later, but not enough to use.)

I used debug to precool the pump apparatus to 30 K (which I could have done without but would have taken forever).  This was not necessary, but it increased the amount of hydrogen collected before it vaporized.

Everything else started at its default temperature except the hydrogen, which started at 70 C, as it does coming out of an electrolyzer.  I could have gotten it colder using conventional means, but I believe 30 K  (or -243.2 C) should be cold enough. 

It is also not designed to create large quantities of liquid hydrogen.  It is created to generate a small amount so that I can create a liquid hydrogen machine powered by liquid hydrogen and an aquatuner, which has no resource cost except electricity.

EDIT:  I misread or misremembered the documentation.  I thought hydrogen had a 17 C range but it only has a 7 C range.  That means I need to improve this by making it stable.  But the fact it consumes raw minerals makes me sad.  I could use an aquatuner to make solid hydrogen and use a door to move dump it and have a system to cool the aquatuner on a cycle, but then I would have to somehow keep the door cool while I cooled the aquatuner with water or petroleum.  I need to engineer more.  But this would still cost raw minerals because of the broken pipes on the aquatuner....

I also accidentally turned off the thermo regulator for my pictures.  It should be on and is in the save.

END OF DISCLAIMER

Liquid Hydrogen.sav

This does not exploit the small packet bug, where tiny packets can not change state in pipes.
This does not use a mini gas pump not in thermal contact with the hydrogen.

Everything else started at its default temperature except the hydrogen, which started at 70 C, as it does coming out of an electrolyzer.  I could have gotten it colder using conventional means, but I believe 30 K  (or -243.2 C) should be cold enough. 

It is also not designed to create large quantities of liquid hydrogen.  It is created to generate a tiny amount so that I can create a liquid hydrogen machine powered by liquid hydrogen in an aquatuner.

This does consume some raw mineral, as a pipe continually breaks and needs repairs.

Spoiler

There are 4 major components.  The liquefying coolling room, the pre-cooling room, the liquefying room, and the pump.

On the far right is the liquefying room cooler.  Its job is to make sure the thermo regulator on the far left doesn't overheat.  It doesn't run very much because the liquefying thermoregulator doesn't run very much.

In the middle, we have the pre-cooling loop.  The purpose of this is to get the gaseous hydrogen to ~ -250 C so that when it enters its next thermo regulator, it liquefies and overshoots the condensation point by as much as possible.  If the hydrogen in the tank gets too cold, it heats up in the precooling chamber through radiation until it reaches approximately -238.2 C.  It then goes through the thermoregulator to reach -252.1 C (because it picked up a little heat along the way), then goes to the liquefying chamber.

Then we have the liquefying chamber on the far left.  The idea here is that -250 C hydrogen enters, gets reduced to -264 C hydrogen, breaks the pipe, and lands in the reservoir below.  It is cooled using the rightmost chamber (as I said before) with a skim of petroleum.  It is kept around -20 C.

Also, without perfect insulation, I decided that wolframite radiant pipes were better than insulated pipes because you can't gain heat from your pipes if they are also -250 C.   Better in this case meaning faster to get any liquid hydrogen.

There is a bug exposed by this machine (which I have reported).  If the outlet pipe on the thermoregulator is broken, the thermoregulator sucks up and holds all the hydrogen and doesn't release it until small packets.  That means the thermoregulator ends up holding hundereds of kgs of hydrogen but never processes it unless a packet smaller than 1 kg goes in.  This leads to all sorts of problems, the worst one being that the petroleum skim freezes and no longer works.  For when this happens, I added a space heater to keep the tungsten floor cold.  So I added a valve to reduce the packet size to 500 g.  For some reason, if I use less than 500 g, I ended up with hydrogen gas out of the pipe, which thermally interacted with the 20 C ladders, which boiled everything and made me sad.

In the attached save, there is already a collection 0f liquid hydrogen.  If you keep running it, you will get more liquid hydrogen.  If you don't precool the pump to about 30 K (which is doable with conventional means), the system will break, by which I mean any liquid hydrogen boils.  If this happens, the entire chamber will need to be vacuumed again to resume production.

Honestly, I don't know how long it took to get liquid hydrogen.  I started this machine at cycle 28 (tinkering with it all the way), and I think I had liquid hydrogen at around cycle 48.  But there were problems and I had to keep tinkering to fix things. 

Also, this is not plug and play, you may want to precool the pump and have a buildup of liquid hydrogen made before expose the pump to the hydrgen.  It isn't necessary to precool the pump with a large enough buildup of liquid hydrogen, but it will break the system.  However, since we only need a little liquid hydrogen to make more liquid hydrogen with an aquatuner.  At the ledge with two tiles to the right of the selected hydrogen liquid tile in the first image, there will need to be a airflow tile to allow for buildup.  Preferably, that tile would be precooled, as when it is deconstructed in a real game, it will call where the hydrogen lands.  (For survival mode realism, I let the copper fall.)

If you use a mechanism like this, I would recommend using it to obtain a small amount of liquid hydrogen, then use the liquid hydrogen with an aquatuner to make more liquid hydrogen.

Also, the whole system uses a max of ~1.1 kw, so that's cool.  I used conductive wire, but you could almost certainly use regular.

When I have time, I will try to make a streamlined version of this that works as reliably but has a shorter buildup time.

 

I should also note that it stops working shortly after the save, but I argue that doesn't really matter because we have some liquid hydrogen.  I would be happy with 10 kg in a reservoir, and I got almost 200.

EDIT:  I misread or misremembered the documentation.  I thought hydrogen had a 17 C range but it only has a 7 C range.  That means I need to improve this by making it stable.  But the fact it consumes raw minerals makes me sad.  I could use an aquatuner to make solid hydrogen and use a door to move dump it and have a system to cool the aquatuner on a cycle, but then I would have to somehow keep the door cool while I cooled the aquatuner with water or petroleum.  I need to engineer more.  But this would still cost raw minerals because of the broken pipes on the aquatuner... 

[Saturnus]

15 hours ago, Zarquan said:

EDIT:  I misread or misremembered the documentation.  I thought hydrogen had a 17 C range but it only has a 7 C range. 

It actually is only 5C safe range currently as liquid hydrogen doesn't liquefy before reaching -254.2C in the game even though it's condensation point is listed as -252.2C. This may be a typo in the game mechanics though, not sure.

[Zarquan]

Just now, Saturnus said:

It actually is only 4C safe range currently as liquid hydrogen doesn't liquefy before reaching -255.2C in the game even though it's condensation point is listed as -252.2C. This may be a typo in the game mechanics though, not sure.

I was working on an aquatuner scheme with hydrogen where I used the hydrogen I got from the above system to make more, and it seems to liquefy pretty close to the listed melting temp.

[Saturnus]

7 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

I was working on an aquatuner scheme with hydrogen where I used the hydrogen I got from the above system to make more, and it seems to liquefy pretty close to the listed melting temp.

This is about as close to the condensation point as I can get by cooling it very slowly. 

[Zarquan]

I overshoot the condensation point with my machine.  I do this by only sending hydrogen <= 250 C to the final thermoregulator.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Would running super coolant through the pipes first be a good way to pre cool the pipes?

[Saturnus]

13 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Would running super coolant through the pipes first be a good way to pre cool the pipes?

Absolutely. However, that would not satisfy the non-space material prerequisite. 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Just now, Saturnus said:

Absolutely. However, that would not satisfy the non-space material prerequisite. 

Oh darn, I should have read the title better.

I have to say, relying on the pipes breaking due condensation is kind of a problem. It requires dupes to constantly repair things and I do believe duplicants give off heat. It does look like the only way to get a starting base of liquid hydrogen.

Also, doesn't the game crash when trying to cool things down below 0°K? That would make running liquid hydrogen through an aqua tuner very tricky. Or the hydrogen actually freezes into a solid and breaks the pipe.

It's a nice set up though. I think as a concept, I assume it is just for cooling and not somehow create power with it or fuel a hydrogen rocket engine, this very much works if you are using a different material then hydrogen. Liquid Hydrogen actually has a very unspectacular conductivity for a liquid. Petroleum for instance has 20 times the conductivity. You could also use this concept to cool down sour gas to methane in a safe way.

[crypticorb]

When you refer to the "safe range" of hydrogen, does that mean the point below where actual condensation occurs (about -252C), or does it refer to the range where hydrogen becomes solid? Or is it referring to the hard limit of absolute zero, and the game crashing?

I haven't experimented much with hydrogen cooling, and I'm not sure of the properties of hydrogen at those extreme temperatures.

[Saturnus]

9 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

When you refer to the "safe range" of hydrogen, does that mean the point below where actual condensation occurs (about -252C), or does it refer to the range where hydrogen becomes solid? Or is it referring to the hard limit of absolute zero, and the game crashing?

I haven't experimented much with hydrogen cooling, and I'm not sure of the properties of hydrogen at those extreme temperatures.

The so-called safe range is the temperature range in which the hydrogen is a liquid.

[Zarquan]

I just noticed that repair jobs are dropping materials.  In my aquatuner extension to this build, I noticed igneous rock falling in to my hydrogen pool equal to the amount put in for the repair (I think).  Did they remove repair resource loss?  If so, I should abandon my aquatuner build and keep working on my thermo regulator one for more continual use.  Because on the thermo regulator build, the sandstone or whatever is caught by a mesh tile. and never interacts with the hydrogen.

[crypticorb]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

The so-called safe range is the temperature range in which the hydrogen is a liquid.

Does hydrogen become solid below that safe range? If so, is that such a bad thing? Could you bring it to the point of solidifying and then ship it to a box close to the rocket, bring it up in temp a tiny bit until it is liquid, then pump?

[Saturnus]

11 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Does hydrogen become solid below that safe range? If so, is that such a bad thing? Could you bring it to the point of solidifying and then ship it to a box close to the rocket, bring it up in temp a tiny bit until it is liquid, then pump?

There are two additional limitations set by the OP that pretty much prevents that.

12 hours ago, Zarquan said:

This does not exploit the small packet bug, where tiny packets can not change state in pipes.
This does not use a mini gas pump not in thermal contact with the hydrogen.

 

[Zarquan]

10 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Does hydrogen become solid below that safe range? If so, is that such a bad thing? Could you bring it to the point of solidifying and then ship it to a box close to the rocket, bring it up in temp a tiny bit until it is liquid, then pump?

The problem is once it is solid, it is annoying to get it to be liquid again for real use.  Blocks on the ground can't send its heat to radiant pipes.  Meaning using it with an aquatuner is hard.

I also don't like the small packet bug.

I hope to make a mk 2 version that produces hydrogen quicker and is more stable, as this version eventually boils the some hydrogen, and as soon as any hydrogen boils, my system breaks.  I would like to account for that and prevent it.  I would also like to get usable amounts of hydrogen faster and increase the throughput. 

If I can get a decent system, then we can run a decent space program without having to make supercoolant (which takes a really long time to get).

[crypticorb]

10 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

There are two additional limitations set by the OP that pretty much prevents that.

Yeah, I guess you're right. It's a moot point anyways, autosweepers don't even recognize solid hydrogen, and using doors for shipment is incredibly impractical.

The devs choice for liquid hydrogen as fuel is odd when there are alternatives. Pure hydrogen becomes liquid at 21K, and solid at 14K, which is that 7K range, which with the in game mechanics is around a 4K range.

Why are we not making something like hydrazine?

[Zarquan]

One thing that is nice is that I got the hydrogen cold enough with my system to transport it a significant distance.  -260 C is solidly in the liquid range (since I don't need to worry about it freezing because nothing I have is colder)

[Zarquan]

I honestly would have waited to post the design until I made a full system that either used the aquatuner or was stable with the thermoregulator, but I don't have time to do it this week.  Hopefully, I will be able to improve this next week or someone else will improve it.

I am just happy I got liquid hydrogen in to a pipe without supercoolant.

A few points that could use improvement:

1. An indicator that the pipe was broken.  I want to turn off the thermoregulator when the pipe is broken.  I feel it should turn off on its own, but it doesn't.  This is probably the source of all the instability in the system.
2. It would be nice if there was a way to do this without breaking the pipe, thus requiring dupe interaction.  I saw a weird interaction with a cold shutoff valve and pipes that released liquid hydrogen without breaking anything, but I haven't been able to reproduce it.
3. I would like to add a fail safe such that if gaseous hydrogen escapes at any point, it will contain the gas to an area, shut down the area, and pump it out before turning it on again.
4. I would also like to experiment with an aquatuner setup, as it requires less dupe work to repair the breaking output pipe.