Atmosia - RCCT Doc
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RCCTv2 TRITIUM CHAMBER GUIDE
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An AINFA (Atmosia Information Agency) production; message @Ilya246 for invite
The RCCTv2 is a rather advanced way of making tritium, extremely fast and efficient, but tedious to set up. And here, I will explain how to do it.
┌───────┐
│ Notes │
├───────┘
│This guide assumes you have basic atmos knowledge and know how to set up a variation of basic spaced-chamber tritium.
│Please have allofatmos.txt (provided at the end of this guide) on hand while reading this.
│If you already have atmos knowledge, skip to the end to just see how to do it.
└───────
┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│ General information you may need │
├──────────────────────────────────┘
│You may skip this and come back to it if you don't understand something.
├─┬────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ Air injectors VS passive vents │
│ ├────────────────────────────────┘
│ │Both air injectors and passive vents may be used to put gas into your chamber. But which is better?
│ │
│ │Air injectors:
│ │- Generally slower than pasive vents, but still fast.
│ │- Gas injection speed scales with the amount of gas inside the air injector.
│ │- Will immediately stop injecting gas after the tile it's injecting into goes over 9000kPa of pressure. Resumes once the pressure goes below that.
│ │
│ │Passive vents:
│ │- Generally faster than injectors.
│ │- Attempts to equalise the gas in itself with the gas in its tile.
│ │- Causes scrubbers to be less efficient, as gas from the chamber gets into the passive vent, yet scrubbers can't scrub from it.
│ │
│ │Conclusion: for most applications, air injectors are better, as the speed of passive vents has few practical applications.
│ └─────────────────────────────────
├─┬───────────┐
│ │ Radiators │
│ ├───────────┘
│ │- Require gas to be actively flowing through them to work. Pumps help with this.
│ │- Can work in both directions. The output is the end with lower pressure.
│ │- Interact with the tile they're on, affect the temperature of the output gas.
│ │
│ │- Heat exchange rate is proportional to dT^4, dT being the difference of temperature between the gas flowing through the radiator, and the temperature of gas in the tile the radiator is on;
│ │Example: heat between 300K pipe gas and 310K air gas will be exchanged 2^4 = 16 times slower than heat between 300K pipe gas and 320K air gas.
│ │
│ │- When on lattice, will cool gas down. Space acts like 2.7K air.
│ │Extremely good at cooling very hot gas. Or tritium, as it has a low heat capacity [allofatmos.txt].
│ │
│ │- When placed inside air, will exchange heat between the tile air and the gas passing through the radiator.
│ │You can use this to, say, cool down hot gas chambers: pump cold gas through a radiator inside the chamber to exchange heat between the cold gas and the hot room.
│ │This will cool down the room and heat up the gas inside the radiator.
│ │
│ │- Behavior on spaced plating is undefined (don't do this).
│ └────────────
└───────────────────────────────────
┌───────┐
│ What? │
├───────┘
│RCCTv2 stands for "Radiator Cooled Chamber Trit version 2". The name matches what it does, and it'll be explained later.
└────────
┌──────┐
│ Why? │
├──────┘
├─┬────────────────────────┐
│ │ Why would i want this? │
│ ├────────────────────────┘
│ │In normal spaced-chamber tritium production, much of the gas you put into the chamber is lost to space. This could be avoided.
│ └─────────────────────────
│─┬────────────────────────┐
│ │ Why is losing gas bad? │
│ ├────────────────────────┘
│ │- Losing gas to space
│ │This means that you make tritium slower, as that could've burnt into tritium instead.
│ │
│ │- Losing oxygen to space
│ │This means you get less of it for frezon production, and that needs a lot.
│ │
│ │- Losing plasma to space
│ │This is especially bad because plasma is limited and costly to purchase.
│ │
│ │- Losing tritium to space
│ │The badness of losing tritium to space should be self-explanatory.
│ └─────────────────────────
├─┬─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ So why can't we just close the chamber? │
│ ├─────────────────────────────────────────┘
│ │You normally can't put gas into air with a pressure above 9000kPa.
│ │This is the reason the "spaced tritium chamber" is spaced, to reduce the pressure so that the injector keeps being able to work.
│ └──────────────────────────────────────────
├─┬───────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ What causes pressure to build up? │
│ ├───────────────────────────────────┘
│ │The PV=nRT formula. However, I'll do the math for you. Pressure is affected by:
│ │
│ │- Volume (liters): twice the volume, half the pressure.
│ │A bigger chamber (volume) means less pressure. Unfortunately, chambers generally do not expand or shrink on demand.
│ │
│ │- Amount (mols) of gas: twice the gas, twice the pressure.
│ │The pressure of gas scales with its amount. More gas means more pressure.
│ │
│ │- Temperature (deg. K) of gas: twice the Kelvin, twice the pressure.
│ │Gas pressure also scales with the gas' temperature in Kelvin.
│ │
│ │Conclusion? Pressure builds up because we keep injecting gas into the chamber and because the burn heats the gas up.
│ └────────────────────────────────────
├─┬──────────────┐
│ │ Consequences │
│ ├──────────────┘
│ │An additional consequence of this: we want to keep our burn chamber as close as possible to a temperature of 1643.15K.
│ │
│ │A temperature above 1643.15K does not make plasma burn any faster [allofatmos.txt].
│ │Therefore, going above 1643.15K does not speed up our tritium production per amount of gas in the chamber.
│ │However, such temperatures also mean we have to reduce the amount of gas in the chamber in order to not go above 9000kPa.
│ │And that means we burn less gas, at no additional speed per mole. This means, above 1643.15K, we make less tritium.
│ │
│ │Conversely, going below 1643.15K causes the burn to slow down more than it causes the pressure to go down, even though we can fit more gas.
│ │So, below 1643.15K, we also make less tritium.
│ │
│ │The spaced tritium chamber often burns quite above 1643.15K. This makes it slower than the RCCT.
│ └───────────────
├─┬────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ How to make pressure not build up? │
│ ├────────────────────────────────────┘
│ │As a direct consequence of what I just explained, there's 2 ways to do this:
│ │
│ │1. Remove gas from the chamber.
│ │The spaced tritium chamber does this. This is bad due to aforementioned reasons.
│ │
│ │2. Cool down the chamber.
│ │This is hard, but results in high efficiency.
│ │The spaced chamber also does this by injecting large amounts of gas at 293.15K (20 degrees C), but that provides negligible cooling.
│ │This is what the RCCT does.
│ └─────────────────────────────────────
└───────
┌──────┐
│ How? │
├──────┘
│The RCCTv2 achieves cooling by using radiators.
├─┬──────────────────┐
│ │ What does it do? │
│ ├──────────────────┘
│ │The radiators are separated into their own independent loop, through which frezon circulates.
│ │It cools down the air on the tile of the air injector, so that it doesn't go above 9000kPa.
│ │This, however, heats the frezon, so the 2 radiators on lattice cool it back down.
│ └───────────────────
├─┬────────────────────────────┐
│ │ Where do i get the frezon? │
│ ├────────────────────────────┘
│ │You start the burn without the frezon. Let it overheat, you'll cool it later.
│ └─────────────────────────────
├─┬─────────────┐
│ │ Why frezon? │
│ ├─────────────┘
│ │Frezon has a high heat capacity [allofatmos.txt].
│ │This lets it cool the chamber down very effectively.
│ └──────────────
├─┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ Wouldn't it still overpressure from waste gas buildup? │
│ ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│ │Yes, it would.
│ │That's why you set the scrubbers to also scrub water vapour and CO2, to prevent their buildup.
│ │You then filter tritium out downstream, after the output radiator.
│ │The waste gases should usually be spaced.
│ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
├─┬──────────────────────┐
│ │ About oxygen buildup │
│ ├──────────────────────┘
│ │In spaced chambers we can put whatever we want into the chamber and not clean it, as that'll get spaced anyway.
│ │With the RCCT, there is no such luxury.
│ │
│ │With the normal spaced chamber injection ratio(~98:2), the *vast* majority of the oxygen doesn't burn, but is instead spaced.
│ │Only about 3-5% of the oxygen is actually burnt and not spaced.
│ │This doesn't happen with the RCCT, as no gas is spaced, so a RCCT will overpressure due to oxygen buildup if you use it with a 98:2 ratio.
│ │
│ │There are 2 ways to deal with this:
│ │
│ │1. Just remove the excess oxygen
│ │This doesn't work. We tried.
│ │
│ │2. Don't have excess oxygen
│ │This is what the RCCT does. The RCCT uses an in-operation ratio of ~54:46 plasma:oxygen.
│ │This is not 5:2 as expected [allofatmos.txt], because a small amount of tritium also combusts and takes up oxygen.
│ └───────────────────────
├─┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ ~54:46 ratio? But doesn't tritium only get made below 1% plasma? │
│ ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│ │Yes. However, the ratio tritium requires can be achieved by simply having "surplus" oxygen present in the chamber.
│ │Not all of the oxygen in the chamber has to participate in combustion or go anywhere. It can just stay there.
│ │This is achieved by, before usage, pumping the RCCT with 1200mol of 1:99 plasma:oxygen mix. Only Afterwards is the mixer is switched to the ~54:46 ratio.
│ │
│ │The 54% plasma will only combust the 46% of oxygen injected along with it, the rest of the oxygen present in the chamber will remain there.
│ │This makes the ratio of plasma to oxygen in the chamber stay below 1%.
│ │
│ │Example for ease of understanding: Say, you have 100mol oxygen in a tile. You inject 1mol plasma and 1mol oxygen (your mixer is set to 50:50).
│ │What is now the ratio of plasma to oxygen in the chamber? Yes, below 1% plasma.
│ │Afterwards, the *newly injected* oxygen and plasma will combust, and the 100mol oxygen you initially had will remain.
│ │Now repeat the process. You get what the RCCT does.
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
└───────
┌───────────┐
│ Schematic │
└───────────┘
┌──┬──┬──┬──┬──┬──┬──┐
│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ^
│ │ │ ┏│ ┳│ ━│ ┓│ │ |
├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤ |
│ │ ┏│ ━│VR│ ┓│ │ │ |
│ | │ ┃│ ┃│ │ ┣│ ┓│ |
├──┼══┼══┼══┼══┼══┼──┤ |
│ ║AU│ ║SU│SL│SU║ │ |
│ ║0 │┣ ║ ━│ ┃│ ┏║ ┛│ | 7
trit├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤ |
<---│VL║AL│ ║SL│IR│SU║ │ | t
out │ ║0┃│╋ ║ │AU│ ━║ ━│ -----> plasma-oxygen mixer
├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤ | i
│ ║AU│ ║SD│SL│SD║ │ | l
│ ║0 │┣ ║ ━│ ┃│ ║ │ |
├──┼══┼══┼══┼══┼══┼──┤ |
│ │ ┗│ ━│VL│ ┻│ ━│VL│ <----- frezon input
│ │ │ ┃│ ┃│ │ ┃│ │ |
├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤ |
│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ |
│ │ │ ┗│ ┻│ ━│ ┛│ │ v
└──┴──┴──┴──┴──┴──┴──┘
<------------------>
7 til
┌────────────────────────┐
│ Schematic designations │
├────────────────────────┘
│Note that I, S, or similar designations mean that the device is present in the tile; its direction is shown via the R, U, L, and D designations.
│
│┌──┐
││ │
││ │
│└──┘ - one tile
│
│║ - vertical thindow or windoor
│═ - horizontal thindow or windoor
│━ - horizontal pipe
│┃ - vertical pipe
│┓ ┗ ┛ ┏ - pipe bend
│┣ ┫ ┳ ┻ - T-pipe
│╋ - 4-way pipe
│V - volumetric pump
│S - scrubber
│I - injector
│A - radiator (must be built *after* anything else on the tile, except pipes)
│0 - lattice
│R, U, L, D - right, up, left, down; show the rotation of the device in the same tile
└─────────────────────────
┌───────────┐
│ Operation │
├───────────┘
│1. Build it.
│2. Link the 8 scrubbers to an air alarm, disable automode, set them to scrub all gases, except: oxygen, plasma.
│3. Make sure the tritium output leads into a filter to filter the tritium out, and the tritium has storage space to go to.
│4. Set your mixer to 1:99 plasma:oxygen.
│5. Start filling the chamber until the sensors on scrubbers in the air alarm say you have 1200-1300mol per tile.
│You may click buttons in the air alarm to have it update faster. It normally updates very slowly and it's easy to miss the right moment.
│If you have above 1400mol gas, vent some.
│6. Disable the mixer and set it to 54:46.
│7. Ignite.
│8. Make ~400mol frezon with the tritium produced out of this.
│9. Make sure the radiator loop pumps are disabled.
│10. Put frezon into the radiator loop.
│11. Enable the mixer at a pressure of ~40kPa.
│12. Slowly raise the mixer pressure. Stop when the plasma percentage in the tiles is close to 1%.
│The gas injected by the mixer may cool down the chamber. Watch out and try to not cool it too much.
│13. When the burn overpressures due to heat, enable the radiator loop pumps
│You may need to enable the pumps at a speed below the maximum, in order to not cool the chamber too much. 1370C or 1643.15K is ideal.
└────────────
┌─────────────────────┐
│ Long-term operation │
├─────────────────────┘
├ Watch the gas amounts in the chamber.
│
├ If the oxygen is dropping. raise the mixer oxygen ratio a little.
│Also do this if oxygen is below 1150mol.
│
├ If the oxygen is rising, drop the mixer oxygen ratio a little.
│Also do this if oxygen is above 1400mol.
│
├ If CO2 is being made, drop the mixer pressure a little.
│
├ If the plasma percentage is significantly below 1%, raise the mixer pressure a little.
│Make sure you have not run out of plasma.
│
├ If the mixer has, for any reason (plasma ran out, depowered, etc), been made inoperational, disable the radiator loop.
└──────────────────────
ADDENDUM: allofatmos