Stationeers Experiment - Air Conditioner

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.

Видео Stationeers Experiment - Air Conditioner канала Autom8it