Lava Boilers

[basebalp21]

The Dw20 episode on the lava frame machine and the infinite lava it provided got me thinking and so I did some math. As it turns out lava in Boilers are an incredibly effective way to generate power.

Here is the Math:

One pump supplied with 10 MJ per tick pumps one bucket of lava per tick because the pump uses 10 MJ per bucket pumped.

Now one 36 HP Boiler uses this much fuel at max heat per tick. ( (6.4 - numTanks * 0.08) / ( 16 LP or 8 HP ) ) * numTanks

So ((6.4-36*0.08)/8)*36. This equals 15.84 fuel used per tick.

One bucket of lava in a boiler is 1000 fuel. As we get 1000 fuel per tick we have the lava for 1000/15.84 boilers. This equals 63.13 or 63 Boilers.

Because lava is not a liquid source, it must be packaged in a solid format such as a bucket. Using a bucket also gives you the bucket back. We therefore need one liquid transposer for each boiler. The output from the liquid transposer goes to the boiler and the empty buckets are pumped out back into the transposer. We use 4 buckets in the system per Boiler.

The overall output of this would be 63*(20(HP Value)*36(Number of Tanks))*1/5 5 mb of steam per MJ. This resuts in 9,072 MJ per tick.We then have to subtract 63*4 for each liquid transposer as well as 13.3(Energy Tesseract Loss) MJ for the pump.

9072-63*4-13.3=8,067 MJ

Now just for fun I'll convert this to EU using power converters and use it to make UU matter.

With these given values for the conversion IC2: 1800 BC/TE: 4375. The formula used is outputQuantity = inputQuantity * inputScale / outputScale
19,607=8,067*4375/1800

This is 19,607 EU/ tick. Now The matter fabricator requires 16.6 Million EU to make 1 UU. So 16,600,000/19,607=846 Ticks per UU Matter. 20 Ticks per second so 846/20=42.3 Seconds per UU Matter.
Subsequently this is a diamond every 42.3*9=380.7 Seconds per Diamond.

Now if on a server and assuming total chunk loaded this would be (60/42.3)*60*24 UU Per Day. 2,042 UU Per Day. If for whatever reason all of these were converted to Diamonds this would be 2,042/9 or 226 Diamonds per Day.


As you can see Using lava as a fuel souce in a boiler is incredibly effective and produces 19,607 EU/tick, 38 Ultimate Hybrids, or 8,067 MJ/ tick.

 

[Peppe]

Lava startup cost in each of those boilers is going to be very bad.

Run the math on how many geothermals or thermal generators you can run. One bucket of lava gives you 20 EU/t for 1000 ticks or 24 EU/t 1250 ticks (thermals).

So your 1 pump can supply 1000 gerothermals and make 20k EU without a boiler or anything else too fancy.

 

[Abdiel]

As you can see Using lava as a fuel souce in a boiler is incredibly effective and produces 19,607 EU/tick, 38 Ultimate Hybrids, or 8,067 MJ/ tick.

Your math groks fine, but I don't agree with your conclusions. You didn't demonstrate that lava itself is efficient, you have just shown how stupidly large amounts of lava the dw20 machine pumps out of a specially constructed mystcraft age. If you produced any other fuel source (other than wood and blaze rods) at that rate, you'd get even higher returns. Or in other words, if you start with a reasonable amount of lava, you'll get nowhere near your numbers.

 

[Lambert2191]

I coulda sworn that lava didn't work in RC boilers... now to find where I got that impression...

 

[basebalp21]

Lava startup cost in each of those boilers is going to be very bad.

Run the math on how many geothermals or thermal generators you can run. One bucket of lava gives you 20 EU/t for 1000 ticks or 24 EU/t 1250 ticks (thermals).

So your 1 pump can supply 1000 gerothermals and make 20k EU without a boiler or anything else too fancy.

The Lava startup will be bad, but at the rate you gain lava you can easily stockpile large amounts of it, as you set the boilers up one by one. You would also have to put more buckets into the system at the start to keep up with the demand of a boiler that is heating up. Your point on the Geothermals is a good one. Magmatic Engines technically would be the best, with 4,500 of them outputting 4 MJ per tick for 18,000 MJ per tick or 43,750 EU per tick. However making that many of either and placing them would take up more room than the 63 Boilers.

Your math groks fine, but I don't agree with your conclusions. You didn't demonstrate that lava itself is efficient, you have just shown how stupidly large amounts of lava the dw20 machine pumps out of a specially constructed mystcraft age. If you produced any other fuel source (other than wood and blaze rods) at that rate, you'd get even higher returns. Or in other words, if you start with a reasonable amount of lava, you'll get nowhere near your numbers.

That amount of boiler fuel can only reasonably be produced from Lava. Fuel is very finite at this point with the way Mystcraft works. If you could have an oil ocean I would agree with you. If you compare how you obtain the Lava compared to everything else, then the Lava is much easier to obtain.

 

[Juice57]

I coulda sworn that lava didn't work in RC boilers... now to find where I got that impression...

There really been no reason to since wood/blaze farms are much easier and cheaper to make than trying to get a lava symbol from mystcraft.

 

[basebalp21]

There really been no reason to since wood/blaze farms are much easier and cheaper to make than trying to get a lava symbol from mystcraft.

But this produces so much more power.

 

[MagusUnion]

I coulda sworn that lava didn't work in RC boilers... now to find where I got that impression...

Liquid Lava won't run in Liquid Boilers. They have to be in Solid ones in bucket form..

Stupid rule, I know.. I just use the Iron Tanks...

 

[Juice57]

But this produces so much more power.

Because trees and blaze are not infinite????? With the soul shards exploit you can have a a few T5 soul shards very quick with nearly no work. Tree farm is 5 diamonds and some track.

Ive yet to find a lava symbol in any of my mystcraft ages nor been able to buy one guess I am just unlucky.

 

[Whovian]

Because trees and blaze are not infinite????? With the soul shards exploit you can have a a few T5 soul shards very quick with nearly no work. Tree farm is 5 diamonds and some track.

Power, not energy. Both produce infinite (or pretty *censored* close in the case of lava) energy. Both, however, produce finite power. Potentially (nearly) unlimited power, though, depending on the size of your setup. So maybe the proper units here would be W/m^3?

 

[lolpierandom]

I could run, easily, 2-3 HP boilers off of my SC farm alone (using both charcoal and biomass), and it can be done alot earlier, easier and faster than this.

Your point?

I need more power? Just build another farm. It's not difficult, and considering how much each one powers, it's much better than this (and did I mention lava pumping lags the crap outta servers?).

 

[basebalp21]

This is much more power. And the act of obtaining the lava isn't difficult either.

 

[Neirin]

You shouldn't be comparing the space requirement for 63 boilers to the space requirement of 4.5k magmatics. You should be comparing the space requirement of 125 boilers - the number you'd need to get an equal power output. 125 max size boilers would take up 5,625 blocks of space (remember you have to factor in the firebox, not just the tanks) and that doesn't count the space required for steam engines or gaps between boilers. I wrote off the space requirement of liquiducts and conduits because magmatics would need those too. As a space saving measure, magmatics would still win by a pretty large margin.

 

[Abdiel]

Talking space requirements:

A 36HP boiler takes up 3x3x4, plus 18 engines, plus tubing and spacing inbetween. Even at full heat it produces 144 MJ/t, and consumes 15.84 buckets of lava per 1000 ticks.

36 magmatic engines produce 144 MJ/t, don't require liquid transposers, and consume 8 buckets of lava per 1000 ticks.

Magmatic engines take up (slightly) less space, but give you nearly twice the output for your lava.

Conclusion: lava is a terrible boiler fuel.

 

[brujon]

You have to see about the resources, as well...

How in the world would you get enough steel cooked in any reasonable amount of time in order to build 63 HP Boilers? Each max sized one costs a little over 2 stacks of steel to make, so we're talking about 126 stacks of steel here. Which means 126 stacks of Coal Coke. Considering the amount of time that takes for a stack of Coal Coke to get made, plus the amount of time needed to actually cook the iron into steel... Not doable in SSP, i can tell you that. Doable on servers due to chunk loaders & automation, but it's still an insane amount of resources we're talking about here.

Setting up fabricators to build the insane amount of Magmatic Engines and then vertically stacking them 4 at a time in an X pattern with a hole in the middle for a Liquiduct to pass through to make Magmatic Engine towers could work. If you started down at bedrock (assuming Flat Bedrock Mod), you can pillar up 254 blocks, multiply that by 4 and you get 1016 engines in each 3x3 Tower. So if you built 3 and a half of those towers, you'd have your insane amount of power right there. Horizontally, occupying a hell of a lot of less space. In fact, building it like this makes it possible to keep all of this energy generation within a 1 chunk boundary.

If you don't want to have your towers starting at Bedrock, and instead started at Y 64 (sea level), you'd then need about 6 of the towers, still doable within a 1 chunk boundary. Each Magmatic Engine needs 1 bucket of lava every 225 seeconds at least, since it produces 18.000 MJ from 1 Bucket at 4 MJ/t. Since it's 4500 engines, each wanting a bucket every 225 seconds, the tank supplying them needs to be receiving a minimum of 20 buckets of lava per second to be able to keep up without draining. That's 1 bucket of lava per tick.

The DW20 machine was not able to output a bucket per tick, so you'd need to expand on the design, and possibly use a separate tank for every tower, but it's doable, and i think would look completely AWESOME in a spawn as a public energy nexus.

HOWEVER, one thing we have to note, is that eventually, the lava where the pumps are is going to be all drained out, and the frame machine will have to move 128 blocks, according to DW20's calculations. Since each move of a frame machine takes 0,8 seconds, and the inchworm drive that only goes forward uses 2 motions per block moved, that's 204,8 seconds before the machine is able to relocate itself, and then it takes a little bit of time before it starts sucking up the lava at the same rate again. Let's say the total time is about 220 seconds.


In that 220 seconds, all the magmatics are still happily chugging along at a rate of 1 bucket per tick, so that's 4400 buckets of lava of storage needed to have the buffer necessary for all those engines to be able to run while the machine relocates itself, and starts pumping more lava into the system. So, 1 max size Xycraft tank, holding 16000 buckets, should be able to do 3 and a half full cycles without even needing the pumps.



Wow, that put a lot of things into perspective. Just goes to show how MASSIVE the Storage is on those Xycraft Tanks. Another thing to note, is that Boilers wouldn't cooperate as well with such a setup, since they take EIGHT times more fuel to heat up than they do at max temp...

 

[Omicron]

basebalp21, there are some misconceptions in your analysis.

First and foremost being the fact that you cannot drive a pump with 10 MJ/t. In fact, you cannot even drive a pump with 1 MJ/t. You correctly looked up the pump's energy requirement as being 10 MJ per action, but you failed to take into account the fact that all Buildcraft machines have a "minimum time between actions". In the case of the pump, this is 20 ticks.

As a result, the Buildcraft pump at its best will give you one bucket of lava per second. One, not twenty. And instead of 10 MJ/t, it will consume at most 0.5 MJ/t in the process of doing so.

And of course, as multiple people have handily demonstrated, lava is a terrible boiler fuel.

 

[brujon]

Hm. That sounds about right. So i'd need 20 pumps for 4500 magmatic engines? That's efficiency right there. I need to build this. But first, Buildcraft needs to fix Builders. Because it won't be an easy build, not even in creative. Don't want to do it 6 times lol.

 

[ultradolp]

Provided that you can have that many boiler, I think there will be plenty of other much better fuel for you to use including:

1) Steve Cart tree farm or Forestry Multiblock farm for biofuel production + Charcoal
2) Refined oil into fuel for boiler. Oil is not hard to comeby in a large amount and you can even get oil bee/oil fabricator if you dig into them a bit

Judging from the amount of iron/steel you have in hand, if you do not want a boiler, you already have access to several MV solar (128EU/t) I guess. Not that I disagree that lava is a good fuel, just that using them in a boiler is seriously bad. Instead, use them in GT thermal generator (30k EU/Bucket), Magma Engine (18k MJ/bucket). If you really want to use boiler, tree farm is probably the easiest one you can feasibly set up. 63 max size HP boiler is crazy amount of resources to say the word "efficient"

 

[basebalp21]

basebalp21, there are some misconceptions in your analysis.

First and foremost being the fact that you cannot drive a pump with 10 MJ/t. In fact, you cannot even drive a pump with 1 MJ/t. You correctly looked up the pump's energy requirement as being 10 MJ per action, but you failed to take into account the fact that all Buildcraft machines have a "minimum time between actions". In the case of the pump, this is 20 ticks.

As a result, the Buildcraft pump at its best will give you one bucket of lava per second. One, not twenty. And instead of 10 MJ/t, it will consume at most 0.5 MJ/t in the process of doing so.

I have tested this and looked on the Buildcraft wiki. The Buildcraft wiki states that the max pumping rate is 20 Buckets per second. Then in a test with a state cell set to 60 seconds, a redstone energy cell set to output 10 MJ per tick when it gets a redstone signal, and a max size Xycraft tank. After running the tank had 1,208,000 MB of lava. This translates to 1,208 buckets which is 60*20 plus the additional delay for the state cell.

 

[Omicron]

Oh? Interesting. This must have changed recently.

I stand corrected, then.