[MindCrack] Solar Boilers?

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ScottulusMaximus

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Jul 29, 2019
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@Scottulus, yes thats where it maxed out at due to the detection range. Just one however can provide alot of energy when its running at max speed if you read through my post (I apologize, it was longer than i intended).

Ah ok I see, will prob optimise it in my own way but wont look for massive efficiency in this build just looks cool... Imagining an array of these(maybe 9x9 complete units) in a desert surrounding a massive white tower looking like a solar power tower with all the engines in!!!
 

Raisu

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Jul 29, 2019
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So, I used a Liquid Tesseract to output the steam produced by the boilers (1 liquiduct wasn't able to output all the steam it produced quickly enough)
This produced ~2,800,000mB of steam.

Since its not too easy to control the max speed of a Turbine, aside from restricting the input of steam, I set one up to go as fast as it could (which needed 4 separate Liquiduct lines)

I ran lead wire to 9 Energy Bridges (all Factorization Charge Consumers, 8 MV Producers, and 1 HV Producer).
Once the fan got above around 1300, all MV Producers were running at full power, I switched one MV Producer for an HV Producer which, as the fan sped up was around 30-40% (went between 128 to 256 EU/t averages when read by an EU-Reader)
Power going into an AESU was 1152-1280 EU/t when the fan was at its highest speed.

In the end, the AESU received ~10,500,000 EU.

Doing a separate test to run 4 separate turbines using the same Steam.
 

Chrissy

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Jul 29, 2019
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View attachment 5892 each mirror adds roughly 10mb/t of steam, or 1/2 and eu/t. The ideal placement of mirrors lets you get 56 mirrors around a single boiler, which produces 28 eu/t. Pretty underwhelming i think, but it runs forever once you get it built i guess.

Also, you can stack the boilers and they share their steam. You can make some pretty cool solar power plants (such as the one I built in creative, shown above)


Can you tell me how to build that owo
 

tompy97

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Jul 29, 2019
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Not sure exactly what you mean Chrissy. The picture explains it far better than I could. Its also very easy to build once you get going, the mirrors face the boiler in the center if they are close enough, and if they are too far away, they face straight up, so its just a matter of placing them as far away as possible, then going down one level and repeating.
 

Wekmor

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Jul 29, 2019
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So, I used a Liquid Tesseract to output the steam produced by the boilers (1 liquiduct wasn't able to output all the steam it produced quickly enough)
This produced ~2,800,000mB of steam.

According to this the reason that my Engines didn't work at fast as they should was just that the Liquiduct didn't take all the steam?

Edit:


Can you tell me how to build that owo

I made a picture of the max (atleast I think so) amount of mirrors.

The boilers go in the middle ofc

2013_07_07_18_56_45.jpg
 

Chrissy

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Jul 29, 2019
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According to this the reason that my Engines didn't work at fast as they should was just that the Liquiduct didn't take all the steam?

Edit:




I made a picture of the max (atleast I think so) amount of mirrors.

The boilers go in the middle ofc

2013_07_07_18_56_45.jpg


I don't know how to do any of that, I use IC2
 

Wekmor

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Jul 29, 2019
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You craft the 240 Reflective Mirrors and the 8 Solar Boilers.
Then you place the mirrors like I did in the picture and stack the boilers directly ontop of the water pool (it's a 3x1).
 

Raisu

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Jul 29, 2019
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Just so the info is available, in case anyone knows more about it or w/e

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe that Steam Turbines operate something like this as far as consumption goes:
  • Fan speed increases by 0.5/t as long as the necessary steam is available.
  • Fan speed decreases by 5/t when steam is empty.
  • SteamConsumed/t = 1mB * FanSpeed
Not certain what kind of documentation or source code there is publicly available that can validate this.
 

Wekmor

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Jul 29, 2019
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So if you have the maximum amount of mirrors. You can't pull out all the steam that is produced?
 

Raisu

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Jul 29, 2019
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So if you have the maximum amount of mirrors. You can't pull out all the steam that is produced?

Thats only if you try to use a Liquiduct to pull out the steam that is produced.

Using a Liquid Tesseract instead will work. Try it with a liquiduct and use a Charge Meter to see how much steam is remaining in the boilers. Then switch to a Liquid Tesseract, you'll see the difference.
 

Patroad

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Jul 29, 2019
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ok so i have a small setup, and i am running the new Unleashed pack and do not have power converters which i miss so much, so is there any other way to turn the steam into EU?

And how do i store a charge in the battery box from factorization? and check on it
 

hotchi

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Jul 29, 2019
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each mirror adds roughly 10mb/t of steam, or 1/2 and eu/t. The ideal placement of mirrors lets you get 56 mirrors around a single boiler, which produces 28 eu/t. Pretty underwhelming i think, but it runs forever once you get it built i guess.

Also, you can stack the boilers and they share their steam. You can make some pretty cool solar power plants (such as the one I built in creative, shown above)
realy love this design its just something diffrent as the usual setup :)
 

hotchi

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Jul 29, 2019
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So i tested the build with a full setup (240 mirrors) build like seen in the picture from Chrissy i get enough steam to power 4 industrail steam engines with a small surplus.

Thats 62 Iron, 1920 Silver(30Stack), 15 Glass for a cool structure with 32mj output.

I set a Liquid Tesseract ontop so i don't need to worry over pipes

Thats a crazy setup cost but afters is build its unlimited free steam that doesn't need maintance

Edit: the output seems to be around 180 steam/t if someone wants a number to calculate with
 

Antice

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Jul 29, 2019
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niiice.. I think i need to make myself a solar thermal powerplant now.
I can probably make a short showcase vid if anyones interested.
 

hotchi

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Jul 29, 2019
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Did some testing with this more mirrors on a boiler is up to 50% more effective then more smaller setups:

i tested 7 boilers with 8 mirrors each for 56 mirrors total that setup produced 7MJ/t in engines or ~11% on a railcraft turbine for 22,22 EU/t

the second setup were all 56 mirrors on one solar boiler that produced 10,5mj/t in engines or ~17% on a railcraft turbine for 33,33EU/t


Other test with 6 boilers with 8 mirrors each gave 6MJ/t in engines or ~9% on a railcraft turbine
All 48 mirrors on one boiler 9mj or ~14% on a railcraft turbine

Thought somebody could find this information usefull :)
 

Antice

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Jul 29, 2019
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Did some testing with this more mirrors on a boiler is up to 50% more effective then more smaller setups:

i tested 7 boilers with 8 mirrors each for 56 mirrors total that setup produced 7MJ/t in engines or ~11% on a railcraft turbine for 22,22 EU/t

the second setup were all 56 mirrors on one solar boiler that produced 10,5mj/t in engines or ~17% on a railcraft turbine for 33,33EU/t


Other test with 6 boilers with 8 mirrors each gave 6MJ/t in engines or ~9% on a railcraft turbine
All 48 mirrors on one boiler 9mj or ~14% on a railcraft turbine

Thought somebody could find this information usefull :)


That is useful. there went my solar flower design out the window.
I'm working on making it work as early game as possible now, but the requirement of having to use liqueducts for the steam is annoying, since you need to set up your TE factory prior to having access to the liqueducts.
And yes. i tested. extensively. even golden waterproof are unable to pull the steam. (i think it's the same as when storing steam, you have to pump it out of the solar boiler. thus adding a valve pipe might fix it.)
 

hotchi

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Jul 29, 2019
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Did a bit of math for my two testsetups with the interesting result that the 48 and 56 mirror single setup both did produce the same result per mirror.

10,5 mj : 56 mirrors = 0,1875 mj per mirror
7,0 mj : 56 mirrors = 0,125 mj per mirror

9 mj : 48 mirrors = 0,1875 mj per mirror
6 mj : 48 mirrors = 0,125 mj per mirror

So it seems there must be some kind of breakpoint by the number of mirrors when the steam per mirror increases so back to testing ;-)
 

Antice

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Jul 29, 2019
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Did a bit of math for my two testsetups with the interesting result that the 48 and 56 mirror single setup both did produce the same result per mirror.

10,5 mj : 56 mirrors = 0,1875 mj per mirror
7,0 mj : 56 mirrors = 0,125 mj per mirror

9 mj : 48 mirrors = 0,1875 mj per mirror
6 mj : 48 mirrors = 0,125 mj per mirror

So it seems there must be some kind of breakpoint by the number of mirrors when the steam per mirror increases so back to testing ;-)


well. for my early power project, i was figuring to scale it so that one boiler could run either one or two hobbyist steam engines at full tilt during the day. this i for the very first set of machines, so everything should be craftable as tier one items preferably. liquiducts are not first tier items, so I'm stuck until i can test out valve pipes at home. will come back with the results there.
 

Antice

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Jul 29, 2019
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well.. since i had a little bit of free time on my hands, i did a test on how few mirrors i could get away with in order to make 2mj/t with a hobbyist steam engine.
what i found, is that at noon i could screech by with only 14 mirrors on a single boiler. giving 0,1428 mj/t per mirror.
However, i suspect that the increase you get is from the fact that the boiler seem to have some kind of warm up cycle before it's fully productive. the more mirrors per boiler, the faster it ramps up it's heat, thus you get steam sooner, there is also the issue of overcoming cloudy days. This is turning out to be a rather interesting method for early MJ production. mone of the components sans the liquiducts actually require any infrastructure.... :cool:


Edit: I did some more testing. it turns out that 13 is the minimum number of mirrors in order to run the hobbyist steam engine at max speed. however. if you add one more mirror to the mix, you get 16 buckets worth of steam stored in the boiler as well as 2 extra buckets in the engine itself. thus it allows you to run the engine for a minute or so extra every evening before the energy starts running out. I dunno how valuable this extra energy is in relation to the cost of an extra mirror, but if you are like me, and mostly don't do much with silver anyhow, then why not go for it right?
 

Raisu

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Jul 29, 2019
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ok so i have a small setup, and i am running the new Unleashed pack and do not have power converters which i miss so much, so is there any other way to turn the steam into EU?

And how do i store a charge in the battery box from factorization? and check on it


Without the Power Converters Mod, you would have to build a RailCraft Steam Turbine. The ~210 mb Steam/t that a stack of Steam Boilers with 240 mirrors generates would only run it at about 65% though. Alternatively, you can run ~5 Industrial Steam Engines to generate 40 MJ/t of of that instead..

Run lead wire from your Factorization Steam Turbine to the Battery Box, it will charge up and to my knowledge only discharge when there is no other source of Charge and a machine is requesting power (Factorization Grinder / etc). There are visual indicators on the block itself to show how charged it is, you can also use a Charge Meter and right click on it. Additionally, when in your inventory the Battery Box retains its stored power (for the purposes of certain recipes)