1.897GW from a Throttled Gas Turbine!

[ChemE]

I've been having some fun abusing the fact that the three blocks directly behind a gas turbine are heated from the hot exhaust to see how much extra power I can squeeze from these things. I'm using an engine control unit beneath the gas turbine to throttle its speed and so use less jet fuel per time. The 6.25% speed setting is useless because those three blocks are kept at less than 100°C. However, the 25% speed setting maintains the blocks at 300°C. In my testing only heat exchangers from ReactorCraft responded to the turbine exhaust and notably steam boilers will not increase their temperature in the same location. So I placed 3 heat exchangers directly behind the gas turbine and the three steam boilers next to them. The steam boilers are happy to draw heat from the heat exchangers since this is how they are intended to work. I'm using Steve's Factory Manager to keep the steam boilers full of water (since they are placed at y-level 2 and I can't get beneath them) and I've insulated otherwise exposed faces with microblocks to limit heat losses.

Steam Generation - Gas Turbine @25% speed, 3 heat exchangers, and 3 steam boilers

Steam Distribution - Equal Split Feeding Two Steam Grates

Power Generation and Merging - Two LP Turbines Powering A Shaft Junction and Coil

So there you have it. A fairly substantial upgrade in power from the paltry 16MW this gas turbine should be putting out at this speed setting. Sure it requires some extra complexity, but we are getting almost 115 fold increase in power at the expense of a bit of lubricant. Not too shabby! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

[ChemE]

Now that I've had my fun and published my uber abusive results, I'm fairly sure that @Reika will want to nerf the hell out of this.

 

[ChemE]

Yup, as I suspected, toss on an afterburner upgrade, add two more heat exchangers (afterburned gas turbines affect five blocks in front of them), and double up on the steam boilers so they don't get too hot and blow and you can push a high-pressure steam turbine.

So now instead of 33.554MW (gas turbine at 25% speed and afterburned) we can generate 8.59GW. Just a little over a 255 fold increase in power from using the waste heat intelligently (uber-abusively).
Overview

 

[ChemE]

Just to round things out, my afterburned 25% gas turbine appears to be 100% ammonia-safe. So 12.78GW instead of 33.5MW or a 380-fold increase in power output. I should rename the thread since it is actually 6.7x as OP as I initially though it was!

 

[Reika]

Oh god...

 

[Scottly318]

And there goes the neighborhood

 

[Reika]

Fixed.

 

[ChemE]

Fixed.

So heat exchangers no longer respond to jet wash?

 

[Reika]

So heat exchangers no longer respond to jet wash?

Correct.

 

[mathwiz617]

Just wondering, do the Chromaticraft heat relays move heat from jet wash to a heat exchanger? If so, you might want to stop that, too.

 

[Reika]

Just wondering, do the Chromaticraft heat relays move heat from jet wash to a heat exchanger? If so, you might want to stop that, too.

No.