Simple, reliable hydrogen condenser

[Coolthulhu]

It's not perfect, but it's good enough and tiny, so it can be easily placed near rockets.

The problem with LH is that the difference between super coolant freezing temperature and hydrogen condensation temperature is less than 14C, meaning that you can end up with pipes full of coolant that is too hot to recirculate and too cold to safely cool with aquatuner.

I solved it by adding a storage tank with heat exchanger that is only on when the coolant is overcooled. Tank+thermo sensor is also much more reliable than a pipe sensor. Pipe sensor would require recirculation to avoid stray packets of overcooled coolant.

Reheating and pumping are both mildly wasteful. At pictured size, needs thermium for pipes - otherwise the radiant pipes exchange heat too slowly and recirculation is needed.

The sensor in tank is set to -250C. That way it wastes a small bit of cooling, but is completely safe and won't send a single overcooled packet in 100 cycles.

The pic also contains some gas pumps (for maintenance) and an oxygen condenser, but those aren't needed.

Spoiler

 

[Lilalaunekuh]

Not sure if you would consider it your willing to abuse a little exploit:

If you use smaller packets of super coolant you can trade power for space efficiency.

=> Your able to cool super coolant below it´s freezing point if your packets are to small to change state

(So for my "small" hydrogen production an inefficient super coolant based system is still effective enough to keep up with my input)

[ruhrohraggy]

9 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Reheating and pumping are both mildly wasteful. At pictured size, needs thermium for pipes - otherwise the radiant pipes exchange heat too slowly and recirculation is needed.

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Unless you are using the incoming hydrogen gas to do the reheating, I think. Then you are still accomplishing the goal of your process...

How much supercoolant is needed for that system to run by the way?

[Nitroturtle]

I like the setup and the tank/sensor for reheating, but I'd warn that eventually you'll run out of heat in your heating plate if you aren't adding more.  My setup uses bunker tile walls from my silo and even that ends up running out (granted, it's probably not optimally efficient).  If I don't keep launching rockets to keep the walls hot, they end up ice cold from the coolant I'm warming. 

You might consider putting the heating plate on the other side connected to the steam turbine room as a more constant source of heat.

I may be completely off-base though, as my setup is in space in a vacuum.  Maybe with the water and gas in the area, it takes long enough to cool that it doesn't matter.  How long have you been running this setup?

[Lifegrow]

13 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

It's not perfect, but it's good enough and tiny, so it can be easily placed near rockets.

The problem with LH is that the difference between super coolant freezing temperature and hydrogen condensation temperature is less than 14C, meaning that you can end up with pipes full of coolant that is too hot to recirculate and too cold to safely cool with aquatuner.

I solved it by adding a storage tank with heat exchanger that is only on when the coolant is overcooled. Tank+thermo sensor is also much more reliable than a pipe sensor. Pipe sensor would require recirculation to avoid stray packets of overcooled coolant.

 

Never had any severe freezing in my LO2/LH builds yet using pipe thermo sensors (except for the occasional little bouncing snowball if the tank get's really low - which instantly melts...)

Think you might have over complicated things a little to be honest

Spoiler

 

[hpongledd]

13 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Think you might have over complicated things a little to be honest

Welcome to the ONI Board. Where ppl have the craziest builds for the simplest stuff. And if it doesnt work, there is still sandbox *runs away*

[ruhrohraggy]

5 hours ago, hpongledd said:

Welcome to the ONI Board. Where ppl have the craziest builds for the simplest stuff. And if it doesnt work, there is still sandbox *runs away*

Gonna defend OP here. Liquefying hydrogen for storage isn't actually all that simple if you want a purely automated system. I could elaborate, but I won't.

I propose to you a challenge of designing a fully automated hydrogen condenser, and then post it here. (Once you get back from wherever you ran off to)

[Nitroturtle]

19 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Never had any severe freezing in my LO2/LH builds yet using pipe thermo sensors (except for the occasional little bouncing snowball if the tank get's really low - which instantly melts...)

Think you might have over complicated things a little to be honest

  Reveal hidden contents

 

In my setup, I had issues with the super coolant freezing when I used below -424F on my sensor for my AT, while -423F worked fine.  The problem was that below -423F didn't leave enough margin for fueling my rocket and I'd end up with hydrogen boiling in the pipes.  Now, it's quite possible that I did something wrong, but I'll add that this took hundreds of cycles before it became an issue at -424F.  That's the reason I ended up going with a more complex setup, which allows me to keep my LH2 no hotter than -425F which seems to be working fine.

Regardless, none of this will be an issue after the patch since apparently they've lowered the freezing point of super coolant anyways.  I just wanted to point out that there may be a reason people have come up with complex builds other than just because they like to overcomplicate things. 

[ruhrohraggy]

11 minutes ago, Nitroturtle said:

In my setup, I had issues with the super coolant freezing when I used below -424F on my sensor for my AT, while -423F worked fine.  The problem was that below -423F didn't leave enough margin for fueling my rocket and I'd end up with hydrogen boiling in the pipes.  Now, it's quite possible that I did something wrong, but I'll add that this took hundreds of cycles before it became an issue at -424F.  That's the reason I ended up going with a more complex setup, which allows me to keep my LH2 no hotter than -425F which seems to be working fine.

Regardless, none of this will be an issue after the patch since apparently they've lowered the freezing point of super coolant anyways.  I just wanted to point out that there may be a reason people have come up with complex builds other than just because they like to overcomplicate things. 

That's the beauty of designing systems in ONI. Some people like super crazy automated systems with hyper-fine controls. Others prefer as simple of a system as possible. From designing stuff in ONI, I've noticed complexities arise from annoying inconsistencies in game mechanics....or small inconsistencies in the system that was originally built.

This is why I like building systems and modules in sandbox. So you can see the system operate on it's own for awhile, and make refinements as you go. I had very little issue with the single stage condenser I designed, but I had gone through several iterations of it before I had arrived at that particular design. Trying to rectify problems in-game tends to be more difficult, especially with a system that is in the middle of running.

As long as it's doing what you want it to do with a tolerable amount of headache, then it's a good system!

And they didn't lower the freezing point by much.

They took it from -447.1F to -456.1F...9 degrees F total.

So we have a little more leniency now, but freezing will still definitely be an issue.

[hpongledd]

 

34 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

Gonna defend OP here. Liquefying hydrogen for storage isn't actually all that simple if you want a purely automated system. I could elaborate, but I won't.

I propose to you a challenge of designing a fully automated hydrogen condenser, and then post it here. (Once you get back from wherever you ran off to)

Nah my build is all over the place: it's a mix of all proposed, similar build, builded from dozen of people in sandbox or normal. Nothing special, honestly i didnt even read OP's build, it looks pretty ok. I just like the fact that people sometimes make crazy builds

ergo you can take your challenge and stick it up your arse   *runs away*

[Lifegrow]

3 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

Regardless, none of this will be an issue after the patch since apparently they've lowered the freezing point of super coolant anyways.  I just wanted to point out that there may be a reason people have come up with complex builds other than just because they like to overcomplicate things. 

Oh no, I wasn't downplaying your build bud, was just saying theres an easier/smaller option was all.

I'm all about needlessly over-complicating things just to squeeze out a bit of extra juice  

[Nitroturtle]

1 hour ago, Lifegrow said:

Oh no, I wasn't downplaying your build bud, was just saying theres an easier/smaller option was all.

I'm all about needlessly over-complicating things just to squeeze out a bit of extra juice  

Yeah no worrys man.  I actually really appreciate simplicity and strive for it as much as possible.  I just distinctly remember having issues with the small temp window in my initial simplistic design, which lead to a more complex solution.  With that said, I've tried to replicate the issue I was having, and haven't had any luck.  It may have been when I was using a valve previously rather than automating the AT itself, which definitely can get wonky without proper bypass piping, so maybe that was my issue all along.  The thing is, I didn't have any problems for hundreds of cycles, then all of the sudden I had super coolant in my AT room and a broken output pipe.  With as buggy as things have been, it could have even been something that happened on a save reload too, who knows.