Thermo-Electric Generator optimizations

Hot & Cold Loops

Because of how gas mixtures behave on SS13, instead of using 2 Nitrogen canisters on each loop, you can try the following setup:

• 1 Canister on the hot loop: This will ensure that the pressure will remain reasonable and that the pump won't jam.
• 2 to 3 Canisters on the cold loop: The cold loop is exposed to space temperature and will contract a lot, allowing you to add more gas to it.

Gasmix Composition

The heat capacity of the gasmix used in the TEG directly contributes to heat, using plasma instead of nitrogen will permit a 10x raw boost in heat capacity leading to a theoretical 10x boost in energy output. While it would be even better to use hypernoblium due its gigantic 2000 heat capacity, 10 times more than plasma, it is simply better to sell it off given the tremendous cost. Furthermore, hypernoblium requires fusion, which should be a more than ample heat source. If for some reason, you can't use plasma (containment breached and gas is vented) or are unwilling to risk pipes being breached and the plasma leaking out, it is advisable to use N20 as it has twice the heat capacity of nitrogen, barring that water vapor can be used, or CO2. Pluoxium has 4 times the heat capacity of nitrogen, but is best sold off or used in internals. Don't even think about using tritium, there is literally no benefit to it.

Going beyond the default setup

In atmospherics, tinkering is highly encouraged; the TEG is no exception. Exotic heating sources such as an active plasmaburn, or an active tritburn, or lava tiles on lavaland (they have the same properties as space, except they heat up to 4000K) are all excellent sources of heat. While experimenting with these heat sources, you may find that your heating method and pumping method become bottlenecks, each issue will be detailed and discussed accordingly.

Heating

While a heater upped to 1413K is fun enough, it is insufficient for producing real power. A plasma burn or even better, a tritburn chamber, generate significantly more heat, with the latter producing large amounts of waste gas that can be used in the cold loop. Getting that heat to enter the spaceloop however, is a different matter entirely. The usual method is to use heat exchange pipes exposed over the burn chamber to transfer heat, using regular heat exchangers are often inefficient and unnecessarily leak heat into the surrounding turfs. In here, it is recommended to use as many pipe layers as one can with the highest volume heat exchange pipes that one can utilize. Doing this will change the distribution of plasma to concentrate at the areas with the largest volume, being the heating pipes, allowing more moles of plasma to be exposed to the heating element and cause higher rates of heat exchange.

When doing a plasma burn, ensure that your scrubbers are removing leftover CO2 from the chamber as the created CO2 saps energy from the burn reaction, with the accumulation of more and more CO2 resulting in lower temperatures. When doing a tritburn, especially an oxygen-neutral tritburn, the large amount of leftover water vapor is an especially large problem. It is advisable to have a large number of scrubbers removing water vapor from the burn chamber and dumping them out into space with a spaceloop intermediary as injectors alone won't have the necessary volume to accumulate the water vapor. When doing this, the residual heat from the water vapor may be utilized for a secondary TEG so as to not waste any precious heat.

Pumping and Compressors

Eventually, the hotloop of the TEG accumulates so much pressure that using a volume pump is no longer sufficient. In scenarios such as these, a blockage is created that will only clear when the pressure from the hotloop input is lower than 9000kpa, the maximum pressure limit for a volume pump. While you could simply use a smaller amount of gas, there are ways to get around the limits of a pump. The most basic one is to instead use an injector, which has no such pressure limits, this vents your precious working gas into the turf, which may or may not be space, resulting in yield loss, but is the fastest method if you wish to simply output large amounts of energy. Indeed this is the preferred method for fusion TEGs that are attempting to break records. The more sophisticated solution is to use a compressor, which is really just a combination of two simple atmos devices - the injector and the scrubber.

A compressor is comprised of an injector and scrubber pair, preferably made airtight by fulltile reinforced plasma and insulated by space tiling. The injector dumps air into the compressor chamber and the scrubber siphons it out to a maximum pressure of 5200 kpa, the result is a two-part pump with no potential to clog, but is limited by the 5200kpa limitation of the scrubber. This 5200kpa limitation need not concern the engineer building the TEG, for it does not come into play. While the compressor is normally used only for the hotloop, eventually there comes a point where the heating is so effective that even the coldloop requires it.

Fusion TEG

The pinnacle thermoelectric engine, built by atmos chads who know how to get shit done. The fusion TEG is a miracle of engineering, capable of generating so much energy it outstrips the sun in energy production by orders of magnitude. If set up properly, it breaks the fabric of the universe and the IEEE 32 bit floating point specification and gets admins both angry, scared and erect. Producing one of these wonders is not easy and any fuckups in thermal containment is practically guaranteed to necessitate a shuttle call, not to mention the dangers of the fusion process and the radiation it creates.

The Fusion TEG is simple in principle, instead of harvesting energy from a tritburn, we use a fusion chamber instead, or a fusion canister connected to a sequestrally-heated hotloop. In both cases, compressors will be required for each side as even the coldloop reaches temperatures in excess of several trillion degrees. It is also critical to ensure that the TEG room is completely spacetile insulated for the safety of the station, one leak and it's your ass on the BWOINK line. Another design feature that is peculiar to the TEG is that the coldloop usually contains in excess of 40000 moles of working gas while the hotloop contains as little as possible, usually below 100 moles. The reason for this is to expedite the air injection process of the hotloop outlet so that fresh work gas can be harvested by the scrubber and to ensure that the heat energy sapped by the working gas from the fusion heat source is as small as possible to keep it hot for as long as possible. Unlike regular TEGs where heat harvesting is maximized, fusion TEGs minimize the heat harvesting as there is already a severe excess of it. There is no practical difference between generating 10 exawatts or 1 gigawatt, both are far in excess of the requisite energy of the station while the duration for which the fusion cell is active for does. The energy produced by the most robust energy-centric setups are upwards of several exawatts, if not reaching into 1.#INF and breaking the game itself, but only last for 30 seconds to a few minutes, while stable and long lived setups produce petawatts and can last for days.

Lastly, do NOT wire Fusion TEGs into the main power grid; use SMES. Wiring several petawatts into the grid just makes repairing the powernets impossible, even with gloves, and practically crits anyone attempting to hack. This can be blamed on you by the admin if the greytard who died to your robustness is salty and whiny enough.

SMES Setup

Due to how the TEG power output fluctuates over time, you can either baby-sit the SMES charging rates, or use a staggered charging profile, on MiniStation SMES are prioritized from left to right, so an optimal setup can be achieved by setting the charge rates (from left to right) to: 120 000 W, 60 000 W and 30 000 W. This will ensure that, for any TEG output over 30 kW, we will always have at least one SMES charging, with priority given to the leftmost SMES.

This charging setup means that we have charging at:

• 30 kW (0-0-1)
• 60 kW (0-1-0)
• 90 kW (0-1-1)
• 120 kW (1-0-0)
• 150 kW (1-0-1)
• 180 kW (1-1-0)
• 210 kW (1-1-1)

Which covers the entire output rampdown of the TEG.