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Making Liquid Oxygen


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There's a (now-closed) recent-ish thread about making liquid oxygen that I'm just getting caught up on, and I've got a few questions:

Q: There are a few mentions of a principle like "recapture the produced cold" or "output cold recapture". What does that mean?

Q: In olineous' system, what's going on with that gas pump? I see that it's pumping some kind of gas out, and using that gas to cool some fluid that's in those, let's call them radiator vanes. Specifically: What's the source of the gas that's being pumped out? Is it something that's coming in as liquid?

 

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Just now, Jumpp said:

Oh, I get it. I thought I was looking at a machine to produce LO2 for use as rocket fuel (which maybe wasn't even a thing back in July, was it?). But I'm looking at a machine for turning PO2 into O2.  Explains a lot. Thanks.

It can be used either way.  If you want lox for the rocket,  then just don't warm it back up to gaseous o2

A: if you use the lox machine to clean p-o2 you have to condense it so it becomes l-o2. L-o2 evaporates to clean and cool oxygen. Since the oxygen is like -160°C you can use some of its coldness to precool some p-o2 that gets then condensed again, that's for efficiency. And you don't need -160°C oxygen inside your base, do you?

If you want to capture the l-o2 just use a liquid sensor set to 10kg or a bit more and pump it to a vacuum inside a doublewalled insulated chamber so it doesn't evaporate. Mind that it's not to bad to pump it through an aquatuner beforehand so you have some degrees headspace before it evaporates.

If you are on to making Nat gas from an oil cooker you have to condense it. Now you have liquid methane that you could use in an heat exchanger to precool some p-o2 as well.

A: I'm not sure what you mean...but it is possible to do as follows...use hydrogen inside a thermo regulator loop to condense some oxygen - capture the l-o2 - use the lo2 in an aquatuner loop to condense more oxygen faster since it has much more mass (10kg per tick) than a bagpipe (1kg per tick)

Mind that you need to monitor the l-o2 so it doesn't change state inside the pipe. Use automation valves with pipe sensors! 

 

Keep in mind, things have changed significantly in the last couple of patches.  While you can still use cold hydrogen for LOX, I highly recommend working toward getting just a little bit of super coolant and using that instead.  I made my LOX setup for rockets using 300Kg of coolant (200Kg would have been enough but I wanted a small buffer).  Using super coolant through an aquatuner makes it completely trivial to produce LOX and even supercool it to make it easier to transport without breaking pipes.  Now, hydrogen on the other hand is a little more difficult, but even that's not too bad at this point.

Okay, thanks. That was super helpful and you were right about all of it. Just a little supercoolant made the LO2 easy. And once I worked out the trick of filtering coolant by temp (under -255? Go right back to the cooling chamber. Above -252? Go to the tuner. In between? Go to the pre-cooling chamber and then back into the sorter) it wasn't hard to produce LH2 either.

The big surprise in all this was just how reliable a temp sensor and a shutoff were. I had imagined that the lag time would be highly variable, but I did several tests in debug mode and found that, so long as I buffer every output line so that there's no jams, and the shutoff is juuuust past the temp sensor, I can reliably sort fluid/gas by temp. I tested this with a big vat of 99C water and another vat of 1C water, joined to a single stream with a T intersection. The temp sensor/shutoff much downstream was able to reliably sort this single stream back into two pools of water, at 99C and 1C. Amazing.

24 minutes ago, Jumpp said:

Okay, thanks. That was super helpful and you were right about all of it. Just a little supercoolant made the LO2 easy. And once I worked out the trick of filtering coolant by temp (under -255? Go right back to the cooling chamber. Above -252? Go to the tuner. In between? Go to the pre-cooling chamber and then back into the sorter) it wasn't hard to produce LH2 either.

The big surprise in all this was just how reliable a temp sensor and a shutoff were. I had imagined that the lag time would be highly variable, but I did several tests in debug mode and found that, so long as I buffer every output line so that there's no jams, and the shutoff is juuuust past the temp sensor, I can reliably sort fluid/gas by temp. I tested this with a big vat of 99C water and another vat of 1C water, joined to a single stream with a T intersection. The temp sensor/shutoff much downstream was able to reliably sort this single stream back into two pools of water, at 99C and 1C. Amazing.

Awesome to hear you got it worked out.  Element sensors work just as well, provided the output lines are kept flowing. I've completely stopped using any gas or liquid filters in my bases and instead use the power saving element sensor/shut-off valve combo.

8 minutes ago, Bedna said:

A bump on this topic.
I have a room full with oxygen at -184,7 (and cooling), but it wont turn into liquid. I have a hp vent in it so it's under 20kg preasure, does that mean it wont turn into lox?

It needs to go a few degrees below it's condensation point before it will turn to LOX.  Just cool it a little more.

On 01/12/2018 at 6:52 PM, Bedna said:

A bump on this topic.
I have a room full with oxygen at -184,7 (and cooling), but it wont turn into liquid. I have a hp vent in it so it's under 20kg preasure, does that mean it wont turn into lox?

I’ve had this same issue. I’ve been patiently watching my LOX making chamber with hydrogen running in through radiant gas pipes, and the damn oxygen sits at around -184.5C and it stubbornly refuses to condense. It took over 100 cycles to even get close to this point.

I guess the old saying about how a watched pot won’t boil applies to LOX too!

On 12/16/2018 at 3:28 PM, r0r said:

I’ve had this same issue. I’ve been patiently watching my LOX making chamber with hydrogen running in through radiant gas pipes, and the damn oxygen sits at around -184.5C and it stubbornly refuses to condense. It took over 100 cycles to even get close to this point.

I guess the old saying about how a watched pot won’t boil applies to LOX too!

I remade the rooms with a few more thermo regulators (4 or 5 i think, was a while since now) in series and the process goes pretty fast.

18 minutes ago, Kabrute said:

 

LOL, yeah, I haven't played the game for a few weeks, but when I asked the question I had one Thermo regulator, then added a few..
Came here to read the patch notes and saw somebody had answered my thread.. XD
I guess you wanted to show your setup, nice, but that looks WAY more complicated than it has to be imo.
Loaded up my old save to get some screencaps. Cools really efficantly and fast once you get the hydrogen cooled.
One switch starts the filling of rocket, I control that manually.

cooling4.png

cooling1.png

cooling2.png

cooling3.png

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