Big Reactors
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Wrote this based on the info I found on the behaviour of radiation, heat etc. and different materials:
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/thr...and-guide-collection.42664/page-9#post-656896
BTW If I had to try and make some large scale reactors and no limits on materials I would test out something like this:
e=Ender
r=Rod
d=Diamond block
c=cryotheum
One Ender layer to absorb and moderate any escaping radiation and turning it into heat(=power). Cryotheum between rods to cool and allow radiation to pass through. Diamond blocks to sepperate the two liquids from each other while still being a very potent cooling agent.
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/thr...and-guide-collection.42664/page-9#post-656896
BTW If I had to try and make some large scale reactors and no limits on materials I would test out something like this:
Code:
e e e e e e e e e
e r d r d r d r e
e d r c r c r d e
e r c r c r c r e
e d r c r c r d e
e r c r c r c r e
e d r c r c r d e
e r d r d r d r e
e e e e e e e e er=Rod
d=Diamond block
c=cryotheum
One Ender layer to absorb and moderate any escaping radiation and turning it into heat(=power). Cryotheum between rods to cool and allow radiation to pass through. Diamond blocks to sepperate the two liquids from each other while still being a very potent cooling agent.
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If you had no limit on materials then you would:
A. use at least 3 layers of cryotheum to absorb escaping radiation, perhaps with one final layer of ender.
Assuming a fuel rod temperature of 1350C, the resulting hardness is 68%. Assuming an initial intensity of 100 a packet of radiation would, as per Big Reactors calculations, be modeled thus:
The first block of cryotheum would absorb 21 of the total radiation intensity, (producing 20 energy), and moderate the hardness down to 11%.
The second block of cryotheum would absorb an effective 46 units of the initial intensity, producing 44 energy, and moderate the hardness down to 2%.
A third block would absorb 21 units of radiation, generate 20, and the resulting hardness would be effectively 0%.
Block 4, ender or cryotheum, only has 11 units of radiation to work with: 8 units are absorbed for an additional 7 units of energy.
Dropping the fuel rod temperature to below 900C drops the hardness to 36%, making the energy yield per block: 42,36,14,5.
Diminishing returns really kick in on the 4th block, but at least 2 blocks of coolant between core and casing are necessary or you will loose over 50% of the available energy.
B. Dispense with the diamond - Ender and Cryotheum tolerate being adjacent to each other.
C. Pack in more fuel rods. Fertilization is a BIG factor, and with the drop in intensity over even a single block of moderator (all the good moderators have high absorption characteristics), well, I havn't modeled this to compute the break even temperature, but it seems higher than 1500C. And a core with that much cryotheum in it isn't going to run that hot.
This reactor interior:
only runs at 1277C.
A design like this shows promise as an extendable alternative to the chessboard pattern. A fertilization of 490% when moderated to 50%, it gets a whopping 124MRF/ingot
Past 3x3, it doesn't seem possible to maintain a core fuel rod to coolant ratio of 8:1 while sticking to a rule that each fuel rod should have 2 faces adjacent to coolant. This pattern of squares only has a fuel rod to coolant ratio of less than 2:1
A. use at least 3 layers of cryotheum to absorb escaping radiation, perhaps with one final layer of ender.
Assuming a fuel rod temperature of 1350C, the resulting hardness is 68%. Assuming an initial intensity of 100 a packet of radiation would, as per Big Reactors calculations, be modeled thus:
The first block of cryotheum would absorb 21 of the total radiation intensity, (producing 20 energy), and moderate the hardness down to 11%.
The second block of cryotheum would absorb an effective 46 units of the initial intensity, producing 44 energy, and moderate the hardness down to 2%.
A third block would absorb 21 units of radiation, generate 20, and the resulting hardness would be effectively 0%.
Block 4, ender or cryotheum, only has 11 units of radiation to work with: 8 units are absorbed for an additional 7 units of energy.
Dropping the fuel rod temperature to below 900C drops the hardness to 36%, making the energy yield per block: 42,36,14,5.
Diminishing returns really kick in on the 4th block, but at least 2 blocks of coolant between core and casing are necessary or you will loose over 50% of the available energy.
B. Dispense with the diamond - Ender and Cryotheum tolerate being adjacent to each other.
C. Pack in more fuel rods. Fertilization is a BIG factor, and with the drop in intensity over even a single block of moderator (all the good moderators have high absorption characteristics), well, I havn't modeled this to compute the break even temperature, but it seems higher than 1500C. And a core with that much cryotheum in it isn't going to run that hot.
This reactor interior:
Code:
...ccc...
...ccc...
...ccc...
cccxxxccc
cccxcxccc
cccxxxccc
...ccc...
...ccc...
...ccc...only runs at 1277C.
A design like this shows promise as an extendable alternative to the chessboard pattern. A fertilization of 490% when moderated to 50%, it gets a whopping 124MRF/ingot
Code:
...cc.cc...
...cc.cc...
...cc.cc...
cccxxcxxccc
cccxxcxxccc
...cc.cc...
cccxxcxxccc
cccxxcxxccc
...cc.cc...
...cc.cc...
...cc.cc...Past 3x3, it doesn't seem possible to maintain a core fuel rod to coolant ratio of 8:1 while sticking to a rule that each fuel rod should have 2 faces adjacent to coolant. This pattern of squares only has a fuel rod to coolant ratio of less than 2:1
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You realy need more then 1 layer of coolant. Dispite what those code digging tables seem to show you, 1 layer of enderium does not stop all radiation. Additionally, diamond blocks are terrible. They are outclassed by cryotheum because of its allround good feature and outclassed by graphite in terms of letting radiation trough (at the cost of temperature). How did I got to this conclusion? Will because I tested this instead of trying to dig up the formulas in the code
Yeah. Two factors: Cryotheum and Ender in the same block might generate the same effective amount of energy, but Cryotheum will pass on 34% of the (not hard) intensity for the next block to capture. So multiple blocks of Cryotheum will capture more energy than a single block of Ender.
The second factor is that a lot of the radiation to hit the first block is hard, and can't be converted to energy, until it has been moderated. So at least a 2nd block is required to capture that.
This table shows the hardness of the radiation for various fuel rod temperatures:
The second factor is that a lot of the radiation to hit the first block is hard, and can't be converted to energy, until it has been moderated. So at least a 2nd block is required to capture that.
This table shows the hardness of the radiation for various fuel rod temperatures:
Code:
0-790C 20-29% of the radiation is hard
790-950 30-39%
950-1090 40-49%
1090-1230 50-59%
1230-1380 60-69%
1380-1580 70-79%
1580-1880 80-90%
1800- 90%+
In a single layer, enderium beats crytheum. For the simple reason that nearly all radiation that can be converted, will be converted. Resulting in the least amount of radiation hitting the reactor casing and turning into heat. Because of this, you will always want to outer layer to be enderium. So that the least amount of radiation will ever reach the casing.
Because radiation travels a maximum of 4 blocks we can add that more then 4 coolant layers is pointless. Additionally, the 4th, outer most coolant should be enderium because anny radiation that can be absorbed should be absorbed here. After all it will never travel anny further annyway. Because we have 4 layers we also ensure that no radiation will ever turn into heat on the reactor casing.
Now you could make the agrument that multiple layers is not always needed. And I will agree. Low temperature and low rod count reactors dont gain alot from multiple layers. But the more Rods and the higher the temperature the more there is to gain from adding layers.[DOUBLEPOST=1402417086][/DOUBLEPOST]
80.000 Buckets of steam per yellorite ingot converts into 960M RF per yellorite ingot.
The best turbine consumes 2B/t and generates 24.0000 RF/t. This gives us: 80.000 Buckets / 2 Buckets * 24.000 RF = 960.000.000 RF
I now want to reach 1 Billion RF per ingot, or 83333 Buckets of steam per yellorite ingot
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Ehm think you got something backwards here.
Heat reaching the reactor casing is a good thing, as this is a major contributor to power production. This is why it is important to have highly conductive cooling materials as they can transfer all the heat from the core(high heat here is bad) to the casing(high heat here is good). But radiation hitting the reactor casing unobstructed will not cause reactor casing heat, its heat potential will simply be lost. That is why it is important to have a layer of Ender as it will moderate all the Fast radiation to Slow radiation and it will absorb all the Slow radiation turning it into Heat for the Reactor Casing to absorb(producing more power).
And yes it might be the case that the Fast radiation turned Slow wont get absorbed in one layer and a second layer would be needed. But unless you run the reactors stupidly hot(would be counter-intuitive to run it higher then 1000C if we are talking about fuel efficiency), then the gain would be very little compared to the increased size/reduced amount of fuel rods.
@Skyqula - my question really was: did it perform better than the coolant in a grid layout? What was the previous design getting in terms of steam/ingot?
@rhn - The Big Reactor code is somewhat intimidating, especially as I don't have a working dev environment to actually run it, but from what I could see, radiation reaching the casing is bad. There is a bit of a misprint in the UI where the UI refers to the case temp and the fuel temp. In the code, the "Case" temp is actually the environment temp. It seems that radiation that is not captured into the environment generates heat in the fuel rods, so radiation actually reaching the case is a very bad thing.
@Skyqula - its not entirely true that it is useless to create a reactor with more than 4 blocks between the rods and edge: When BR computes the total heat generated each tick, it *divides* that value by the volume of the BR to compute the resulting temperature. So making a reactor larger will always lower the environment temperature, which seems to be beneficial wrt the generation of RF from the furl/environment temperature differential.
@rhn - The Big Reactor code is somewhat intimidating, especially as I don't have a working dev environment to actually run it, but from what I could see, radiation reaching the casing is bad. There is a bit of a misprint in the UI where the UI refers to the case temp and the fuel temp. In the code, the "Case" temp is actually the environment temp. It seems that radiation that is not captured into the environment generates heat in the fuel rods, so radiation actually reaching the case is a very bad thing.
@Skyqula - its not entirely true that it is useless to create a reactor with more than 4 blocks between the rods and edge: When BR computes the total heat generated each tick, it *divides* that value by the volume of the BR to compute the resulting temperature. So making a reactor larger will always lower the environment temperature, which seems to be beneficial wrt the generation of RF from the furl/environment temperature differential.
So more glass? Gotta test that...
Yeah... no. For the 3rd and 4th layer, sure. But the second layer is a must have. A 5x5x3 single rod reactor with a single layer of coolant runs with a temperature of 157 and a fuel efficiency of 7893 Buckets of steam per yellorite ingot. A 7x7x3 single rod reactor with 2 layers of coolant (inner cryotheum, outer ender) runs with a temperature of 112 and a fuel efficiency of 9250 Buckets of steam per yellorite ingot. Thats an easy 17% increase.
Yeah... no. For the 3rd and 4th layer, sure. But the second layer is a must have. A 5x5x3 single rod reactor with a single layer of coolant runs with a temperature of 157 and a fuel efficiency of 7893 Buckets of steam per yellorite ingot. A 7x7x3 single rod reactor with 2 layers of coolant (inner cryotheum, outer ender) runs with a temperature of 112 and a fuel efficiency of 9250 Buckets of steam per yellorite ingot. Thats an easy 17% increase.
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Big Reactors looks weird and intimidating
Says the guy trying to build more optimal reactorcraft reactors