Stationeers Experiment - Air Conditioner
Вставка
- Опубліковано 1 жов 2024
- In this marathon Stationeers Experiment video, I tackle the most complicated topic to date, "how does the atmospherics air conditioner work?"
If you want the simple explanation, watch the video. Do you want the nitty gritty math details? Here they are:
Power usage is 5W on standby (switched on but not running). When running, it draws anywhere from 300W to 6005W. The running power variability depends entirely on the difference between the waste pipe and the input pipe, and not on the amount of cooling performed. For instance, if the input is a single pipe segment with 367K gas, the power usage will be 300 + 32.6 x (Tw - Ti), where Tw is the waste pipe temperature in K, and Ti is the input pipe temperature in K. It will, however, max out at 6005W. The 32.6 number is W per deg K of difference and depends on the input temperature. The A/C unit maxes out power usage at 6005W when the waste temperature in K reaches approximately 147.5% of the input temperature in K. The power usage rises linearly from 300W to 6005W proportional to the difference between the waste pipe temperature and the input pipe temperature.
Every tick, the unit attempts to pump 6000J of heat energy from the processed gas over to the waste pipe, regardless of how much power it's using. There are two things that can limit this: it won't cool the gas down lower than the setpoint on the front panel, and if the power usage maxes out at 6005W, it starts decreasing the heat energy removed by every degree K more of difference between the waste temperature and the input temperature. For instance, if the input is a single pipe segment with 367K gas, it will reach 6005W at a temperature difference of 175K. However, it will still keep running at twice the temperature difference (350K) but instead of moving 6000J of heat, it will only pump 3000J of heat to the output. Because of this, chaining two air conditioners in series doesn't appear to offer any improvement to cooling performance over operating two air conditioners in parallel.
The amount of heat energy added to the waste pipe per tick is the amount of heat removed from the gas being processed (maximum 6000 J) plus half of the energy consumed in excess of 300W. So if the A/C is consuming 1000W and pumping 6000J of heat energy out of the processed gas, it will add 6000 + (1000-300) / 2 = 6350 J of heat energy to the waste pipe.
The amount of gas moved from the input to the output depends on two variables: input gas temperature and the number of pipe segments (volume) of the input pipe network. My best guess of the rule being used to calculate the mols of gas processed per tick is this equation:
n x T x S x R = 10123
...where "n" is the mols of gas moved per tick, "T" is the input gas temperature, "S" is the number of pipe segments, and "R" is a constant 8.3144. I prefer to use this simplified version:
n = 1218/(T x S)
This means that doubling the input temperature halves the mols of gas processed, as does doubling the number of input pipe segments. Note that a passive vent attached to the input will count as one of the input pipe segments.
Once we know "n" then we can calculate the maximum number of degrees it can be cooled because we know the maximum amount of heat energy removed is 6000J. Different gases have different heat capacities. For CO2 it's 28.2 J/(mol*K), or 28.2 J to drop one mol of gas by 1 degree of temperature. To calculate the output gas temperature, we can use this equation:
T2 = T1 - 6000 / (n x 28.2)
...where "T1" is the input temperature and "T2" is the output temperature. If T2 ends up being less than the setpoint temperature, then less heat will be removed and the output temperature will be the setpoint temperature. This assumes the temperature difference between the waste and input pipes isn't large enough to cause the A/C unit to max out its power usage.
Caseguard made an excellent follow-up video to this which shows that if you can pull the waste pipe down to zero every tick, the power usage will stay at 300W: • Stationeers: air condi...
It's basically a very quirky vortex tube. All of my ACs run at 300W, and if I want below 0 Celcius, I just run it in reverse-flow, where the 'WASTE' is the actual output with the machine set to +200. This gets temperatures at or near -273 Celcius. (Absolute Zero)
Getting near -273 in Venus is incredibly inefficient power-wise and really only recommended if you have plenty of power/time to spare, since you need at least a cascade of 3-4 AC Units.
IF this game actually modeled Phase change, that would be sweet. (which they are taking steps towards, denoting they separated H2O and gasses) Phase change is what is required to make ACTUAL AC units work.
Nice experimenting! You can also think of the "waste" output as the heat exchange line. There are many ways to use an AC, and this for sure is valid. However, it's important to note that there are more efficient gases you can use, I believe pollutants is one of the best because of its heat capacity, sort of acts like a refrigerant. Any gas will indeed work, but pollutants works better usually. If the waste/heat exchange line is empty or low pressure, the AC will pull from the input to fill it to at least 100kpa(or around there iirc). I prefer to manually fill it or use logic though as it gives you more control.
Say for example we want to cool down an input gas, we can hook up the input to the output, and fill the waste line with X. The heat exchange line will then dump the heat into the waste pipe. If we were heating a gas, it would instead make the waste pipe colder by taking heat from the waste line. As the input temp and waste temps difference grow further apart, the more work the AC has to do and less efficient it becomes, so typically you want radiators on the heat exchange line so you can use the atmo temp to cancel out some of the difference(since it will equalize temp with atmo over time). However there are certain scenarios where you can use the waste line to your advantage.
For instance, instead of combustion, you can just use hot gas created from the waste line and input that directly into a furnace. You could set this up by simply putting a passive vent on the input and output of an AC, then pump the waste full of any gas. You'll want an insulated tank(and insulated pipes) on the waste line too just for volume. Set the AC to -200 to get hot gas on the waste line, or +200 to get cold gas on the waste line. If you don't want to wait a long time you can even string more AC's together, or jump start the whole system by using combustion to make a large supply of hot gas, then just using the AC's to keep it hot or make it even hotter than combustion allows.
Great Video! Really appreciate your work!
First class research. This went way beyond the experiments I've tried and explains why my experiment failed when transported to Venus. Go to the top of the class. Thank you.
Thank you very much! This stuff just makes me ask more questions though... More research coming. :)
@@autom8it339 Can't wait, subbed. Seriously not enough content creators for Stationeers!
Unfortunately I think this video is out of date since the phase change update. In the new air conditioners the efficiency is calculated from A: the input temp; After about 100C efficiency starts dropping with 0% around 600C. B: temp diff between input and 'waste'. Efficiency drops starting at around 50 degrees difference. C: pressure difference between input and output. So you can't magically get 6kJ of cooling no matter the temperature of your input and waste. One major improvement to the game in recent updates, though, is more feedback from the machines about what they are doing instead of being total black boxes. The new air conditioners show you the efficiency stats on the display in real time. The heat exchanges tell you how much heat they move.
Thank you for your research! This will come in handy for our multiplayer map.
Glad it was helpful!
👍👍
Oh man, I did almost the exact experiments for myself but I hit a brick wall. I had almost identical setups on different maps, some were working and some weren't. No part of my brain ever considered there could be a link between efficiency and input pipe segments! That's wild. Thankyou! Have you tried this with tanks instead of segments to decrease mol input? Same result?
Well, I haven't tried with a tank, but if you hook a pipe to a tank, they have different atmospheres, so I doubt the tank would affect it.
I think I was lucky to notice the input volume thing.
@@autom8it339 Turns out your genius isn't quite complete. So I merrily employed your amazing system on several maps and suddenly it stopped working my new game. Turns out that it's not JUST in input pipe segments but also the OUTPUT pipe segments (probably a function of the two). I had your venus system connected to a super long filter line and it was creating 300 degree air, I couldn't understand it. All I had to do to fix it was put a digi-valve 1 pipe off the output of the AC, effectively limiting the output pipe segments to 1.
@@MintyMike26 yes, we've been discovering that too. It seems to be related to input to output volume ratio. You can also use a regular (manual) valve to split to pipe into two segments.
About that passive vent counting as a pipe. I also found that it counts as uninsulated pipe so if you have a passive vent on your wall venting outside, it will slowly exchange temperature with the inside where the back of the vent is in contact with the atmosphere inside.
Very true. You'll notice Mick always puts full frames on his ceiling now so he can put vents on the ceiling for this reason.
Thanks for the info! Tying to the lessons from your experiments, I set up a Venus greenhouse using outside air. I needed 4 times the number of "input" as you do "output". 4 Output + passive vent for output, and 16 + passive vent for input. This was for 20c target temp, and it keeps at 300w.
LOL from 463 to 20 using 300W, it's pretty damn good air conditioner. Thanks for the video, very useful!
Anyone know if this is still applicable with the latest updates or have they patched this out?
Even when this was new, none of the “main UA-cam stationeers guys” seem to even be using this method. I used this on Vulcan and I know it worked but this was before all the updates this year. This seems to be a little known trick to cooling systems. Less mols means less to cool and because there’s less to cool you apply more temps to those mols and therefore can get it much cooler and faster. The use of radiators to cool down a room with it makes this system near genius to use in any cooling application.
Great experiments! No idea pipe length made such a huge difference.
Really nicely done! I had all but given up on these.
Two follow up questions:
1.) What happens if the waste pipe gas is colder than the input? Does it affect the power cost for cooling?
2.) Does the AC unit add the full 6000J of energy to the waste pipe? (i.e. if you connect input, output, and waste together the temperature does not change?)
Thanks! To answer your questions:
1) If the waste pipe it cooler it doesn't seem to help (still takes 300W and only cools 6000J/tick).
2) The waste pipe receives the sum of: energy removed from processed gas (which is up to 6000J), plus 50% of the electrical energy used in excess of 300W. So if you tied them all together, I don't think the temperature would go up, but this is only possible because the waste and input are at the same temperature so it only draws 300W and won't add any more heat. But I haven't tried that.
very fascinating. with this it should be possible to setup a GFG on Venus with net positive power production. Any way to set it up to have a higher output (at the cost of more power obviously)? Would be silly to set up 100 ACs to achieve high flow.
Yes, I was thinking about your earlier video. I think you can be power positive with GFG. I suggest trying on Vulcan first on captured night air. That would get you twice the cooling power per watt than Venus. But no, 6000J is your max per unit.
Effective cooling is about 2000J per tick for 300W on Venus, 4000J per tick for 300W with Vulcan night air.
he figured out how to "efficiently" cool ur base down without needing a huge setup
There is also a slight disadvantage you haven't dealt with on Venus as its Atmosphere is high pressure. If the Waste Line on the AC has less than 100kpa it will bleed all input pressure to it until it reaches that 100kpa. Obviously with Venus ( the only of its kind in Vanilla worlds with 224kpa ) it serves for a big advantage with the AC in that regard.
Yes, on other planets you'd have to pressurize the input/waste pipe. On Vulcan I'd pressurize with night air. You'd have to exhaust and pressurize again every few days.
Great work, already up and running on my venus base!
needs updating
I thought I knew about everything about ACs, I've done probably 20 hours working with them in creative trying to get a GFG power positive on Vulcan and or Venus. The number of pipes on the input altering the flow rate I wasn't aware and it does answer a lot of flow issues I was having. I did control the flaw rate at some points but this shows why I was having issues increasing it.
Good info for sure but it doesn't change the fact you'd need more than 33 of them ( More power than would be produced ) running like that to cool a GFG a 1kp input. They just produce insane heat lol.
I would certainly be interested in seeing an Experiment video if you could achieve a power positive GFG on the hot Planets :)
You are certainly one of the top Minds playing Stationeers :)
Thanks! How much heat (in J) does the GFG produce, anyway?
@@autom8it339 I haven't tried to figure that out. You have more patience than I doing per tick testing. A small example to kind of put it in perspective, if you have the GFG encased in a 1x1x1 and feed it lets say -70 degree air out of a tank with 5mp pressure, the input volume pump is generally running at about 7-8L/tick of 5Mpa gas ( lol.. ) on its setting to keep a 1kpa fuel input GFG in operating temp.
Wide open with full input I have a set of them each producing 97Kw, ( I of course don't use that much power even in this obscene base I'm building on Europa they only run for a short period to charge the battery rack up ) Using the ambient air pressurized to 10mpa @ around 133k the feed volume pump runs at about 6L/tick to maintain operating range.
I've since abandoned that cooling technique for one used by Elmotrix ( Another Stationeer/UA-camr ) to just have a large enough room space volume as a buffer to cool with Eurpoa atmosphere without the wild temp fluctuations. My skills in making a smooth PID controller are basic at best.
At 14:50 did you hook up the waste vent straight to the conditioner without a pipe? If i do that it is not venting the waste, i have to place a pipe then the vent, weird
A passive vent is a pipe. Are you sure it's a passive, not an active vent? Also make sure the connection on the vent is pointing the right way. That's gotten me more than once.
Outstanding!
Is this still valid with the latest version? I'm having some serious headaches with similar setups!
No, they changed it completely. Check out the new air conditioner video at the channel "Cows Are Evil" for updated information.
@@autom8it339 oh lordy than you, I think I've mostly figured it out tonight but will check the vid!
I also found that it depends not on the input pipe length, but input/output pipe lengths Ratio. And I saw how it’s performance seems growing with increasing pressure of output.
Re pipe length: if i need a longer run of pipe, does setting a valve at the correct distance for in/out maintain the math?
Yes, but please realize that air conditioners don't work this way anymore.
@@autom8it339 thank you.
just found a vid on that this morning: came to say so.
I've been trying to go the other way with AC's. Using the AC to heat a furnace from heat from the base. Kinda works, but uses so much power, you are better off just using wall heaters. i think there may be a way to maybe use 2-3 AC units if they are connected correctly.
Actually, in my next Venus getting started episode I'll show you how to use an A/C to smelt steel in a furnace without using a ton of power. Stay tuned. :)
@@autom8it339 I think you can take it much further than just making steel. Using what you showed here, a fully electric furnace should be possible by sealing the input-waste loop so new gas can't enter and then just let the waste heat slowly build up. The temperature can go very high this way, for only 300W per tick. Just before hitting vaccum in the input-waste loop, it's not hard to get over 1 million degrees.
It seems like it's not just the input volume that matters, it's the input/output ratio (maybe you said that, idk). I found 2:1 to be the same as 4:2. When trying to build heat in the waste-input loop, we want the cooling in the output to be -200°C for as long as possible (as temperature goes up it becomes harder to cool down). I found a 5:1 ratio to work well here, it starts to slowly bleed through at temperatures of 600+K but just a little. Adding even more input pipes to make it more efficient will also slow it down, and a short heat-up time is desireable too. This ratio will not change by connecting to other pipe networks at the output or input, so we can very easily connect a tank if we want to heat up more gas than the pipes can hold on their own.
From the limited testing I did (with CO2 starting at 292K) I noticed a trend. Every time half the moles had been removed from the waste-input loop, the temperature had increased by 75%, it doesn't seem matter which temperature we start at (as long as the output remains close to -200°C). If this trend is true for any gas and all setups, it would be really easy to predict how much starting gas we need to reach a desired temperature and pressure. And if heating feels slow, we can just add more AC's by adding more pipes as long as we maintain a 5:1 ratio for the input and output volumes for each AC (there could be better ratios to use).
This... is this really right? You found something aboslutely bonkers. Gain extreme heat by just reducing the number of mols, it's way too simple. The AC is broken for sure.
edit: the gas will be heated in the insulated pipes to avoid any cooling from happening, the final step is to move the gas into the furnace
@@ketrix1594 It's not that bonkers... if you take PV=nRT, then if you decrease n and keep everything else the same, T has to go up.
What's weird is that V (or the V ratio, as you say) controls n. That's bonkers.
If you look at Casegard's follow-up video to this video, you can see a better way to feed a furnace. Basically take the waste pipe and use a back pressure regulator to empty it every tick. Feed the input from atmosphere, or whatever the hottest gas is you have. Based on later measurements we did, 2/3 of the input gas will be diverted to waste, and then heated up. It still only draws 300W. However, waste pipe length seems to affect power usage, so Casegard said it needs at least 4 pipe segments on the waste to keep it down to 300W.
@@autom8it339 very good video, thanks for mentioning it. He looks at the same effect, but I like his setup more than my own.
I think the AC uses the PV=nRT too liberally. Temperature is difficult to increase, energy must be added to the system, and this formula doesn't show that fact and the AC seems to be ignoring this too. What the AC does to the temperature, is like taking a cup of coffee mixed with milk, and then separating the milk and coffee back out.
Very nice experiment. Wow pipe lenght cuts the flow rate substantially! Also moral of the story, don't let your waste side heat up. I did another experiment to see if thermodynamics hold up. Was disappointed to see temperature has an effect on pressure, but changing pressure did not change the temperature with fixed mol count. Guess they calculate it like mol/volume*temperature = pressure. And it doesn't go other way around
As best as I can tell, they're using PV=nRT, and each atmosphere object (large grid space, or inside of a pipe or tank, inside of suit, or even your lungs) has the properties of "n" (of each gas type) and heat energy in J. It then uses the known volume, and specific heat of each gas to calculate the pressure based on everything it knows. So if you change the volume (say, by adding or removing a pipe segment), the heat energy in there stays the same, so pressure will increase or decrease proportionally. Heat will move between certain objects (uninsulated pipes or tanks and the atmosphere, etc.)
@@autom8it339 i was trying to make an actual heat pump. One side high pressure chamber one side low. Pumps with regulators, closed cycle. Radiators all over them. What ever i tried, it didn't work. Then i did experiments, sure increasing the temp boosted the pressure. But pumping the gas to a smaller volume didn't change the temperature a notch. Then i realized yes they use pv=nrt but pressure is the final output, not an input in any case. Sorry that's bit off-topic but i needed to whine about it
@@LeventDV I admit I stopped taking chemistry after first year. But don't all heat pumps rely on phase change? The compressor forces a phase change from gas to liquid and the coolant is forced to give up it's latent heat of evaporation on the radiator side. Then it's pumped through an orifice into a low pressure chamber to force it to evaporate and that side absorbs heat. But it's all based on phase change, right?
Stationeers doesn't have phase changes, that's why it doesn't work.
@@autom8it339 not necessarily. With vapor cycle yes, phase change for certain materials can suck up/release much much more energy than temp change. They are great! But still, If you squeeze a gas, it heats up, bleeds energy off to surrounding, you move it into the chamber and let go of pressure, conservation of energy, so it's chilly now instead, it sucks up the heat from chamber to equalize. Then move back to outside and repeat, there, you have a fridge. That's a gas cycle and there's no phase changes, and it does not work in game
@@LeventDV interesting! No, the game doesn't model this. The devs have repeatedly told us this isn't a physics/chemistry simulator. I think, given the performance issues they've had, I doubt they're looking to add thermodynamics calculations to the game, so I don't see them adding this.
Nice work. It is strange that the additional pipe length causes it to process less volume per tick. It sounds like you may have discovered a bug.
It's definitely strange that PV=nRT, but for calculating how much mols of gas to take, it's nTSR=10123. Since "S" (pipe segments) is an analog for "V" (volume) then having "n" and "S" on the same side of the equation is weird, and seems like a bug. It's even more strange when 10123 appears to be one standard pressure "P" (101.23) times 100. It would make much more sense for it to be nTR = 101.23 x V, where "V" is "S" x 100.
Dean Hall had apparently said he thought the A/C unit didn't work very well and they had discussed replacing it with heat exchangers. Heat exchangers are already in beta. In truth, it's the opposite - A/C units kind of work too well.
I want to continue my Venus Getting Started videos... the next topic was going to be cooling the large section of the base, and that's why I stopped to figure out how air conditioners work. If the future of the A/C unit is up in the air, I'm not really sure how to proceed. If A/C units are going away, the videos will just be confusing to future viewers.
Thank you so much for this work!
I love these experiments! And the analysis was spot on, very clever.
Have you ever tried cooling gas to 0K just to see what happens? I haven't. I'm just thinking that PV=nRT might not like that, which could be fun. And how would a gas generator react to 0K fuel? Possibly violently, but who knows?
I did an experiment with a 1x1x1 area (half a frame above above ground level) surrounded with frames that I pumped up to 17MPa pressure, then I opened the bottom frame and was blown away at a 45° angle for 350m (on Europa) and kept falling through the ground and until the terrain had been loaded. I was hoping for a way to blast big holes into the ground for lazy mining, but sadly all I got was a fast travel device out to nowhere. Hm, I wonder if building a barrel of some kind would have thrown me even further...
You should have video'd that! :)
I haven't tried cooling to 0K. I know a lot of objects take damage below 1K ("shatter").
@@autom8it339 Oh right. That could be how the devs prevents the system from breaking. Just shatter every device before it can cause division by zero. Now that's problem solving.
You are a lot smarter than me
In another video I se you're experimenting with the thermos of pipes. While testing room temp/pressure to find safe level that the adv furnace and other stuff don't melt, I ran into a strange bug which I posted to their Jira awhile back bit it hasn't been looked at yet. Don't know if you want to check it out more. Basiclly it's a 1x2 room with some un-insulated pipes with heat sinks. I think it might have to do with the HS facings transfering heat into the ajoining frame space outside the chamber. The room is doubled walled and you can vac it, but when the gas in the pipes heat up, the areas on both side at the window end heat up. No other area heats up. The test has an AC to provide heat to the pipes. If you draw a vac on the pipes and use the wall heaters to heat up the room, again, no heat outside the room.
This is the save: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2427559639
Could that be because the uninsulated pipes transfer heat to both sides of a double wall, not just the side with the radiator on it? Or am I reading that wrong?
@@autom8it339 The uninsulated pipes don't touch the walls. They connect to outside teh chamber and to regulators via insulated pipes. The area outside the chamber on both side heats up. When you walk into that frame area next to the wall, you can see the the area is hotter. Stand on top, ether end, ether side at the other end, no heat. If the room is a vac, it should just cool the pipes, but instead, you get heat outside the chamber. If you vac te pipes, put a little gas in the chamber and use teh wall heaters to heat the chamber, again, no heat. I haven't tried anything with the heat sinks removed or rotated yet to see if the heated areas move.
What is making all that noise?
The boxes behind me were at a low pressure inside, on the edge of the 200 kPa limit of the composite windows. When I released the waste canister, it put them over the limit briefly, and that triggered the moaning sound. I think the sound just keeps going though.
Are you the unofficial-stationeers-wiki admin? Nice to meet you sir
Heh, no, but I did some updating in the wiki for the A/C unit.