Mj per tick, how to calculate?

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keynah

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Jul 29, 2019
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I recently have been investigating my buildcraft combustion engines running off of ethanol from forestry. In game (1.5.2). It says the engine will generate 4mj per tick for (insert time here. On mobile so I forgot the time sorry). I was wondering how to calculate the total amount of mj I am generating per bucket of ethanol(the orange biofuel stuff). I am not sure if repost sorry. Also do T.E. energy conduits affect total net gain?
 
There are twenty ticks per second*, so you can multiply the per-tick rate by twenty to get the amount of MJ that would be produced in ideal situations**. In many cases, the tooltip also includes the total sum.

* normally.
** Combustion engine warmup is very quick, but it matters for steam boilers.

Thermal Expansion Conduits take, with default configuration, 5% of all energy as it enters the conduit network from a normal BuildCraft Engine (thermal expansion engines and energy cells skip this effect). Older Buildcraft conductive pipes, before BuildCraft 3.7.0, had power loss based on type of pipe and distance, but newer ones do not. Conduits can reduce energy gain, although for most people the difference will not be huge (and this may change in newer versions of Thermal Expansion).
 
Facts I've Established:
Minecraft follows the twenty tick per second rule.
Energy conduits has a 5% loss from the total energy currently running through them? (See below)


--Note this completely disregards the temperature of the engine and the input substance needed for the initial warm-up--

[Forestry]Ethanol(Biofuel, orange liquid, etc) burns in a combustion engine for 4mj per tick for 60,000 ticks.
Each second or every 20 ticks, the engine would output 80mj. 4mj*20tick = 80mj
Ethanol will last per bucket for about 3,000 seconds or 50 minutes. 60,000 ticks/20 ticks per second = 3000 seconds 3000 seconds / 60 seconds per minute = 50 minutes
Over the course of 50 minutes or one buckets worth of ethanol, a combustion engine will output 240,000 mj.

If an energy conduit is attached to the engine to allow for energy transfer over long/short distances two scenarios could occur,
1) There is a 5% loss of energy per tick for total energy.
Output of 4mj per tick with 80mj per second. 5% of 80mj would be 4mj loss per second.. 0.05 *80 = 4
Total loss for 3000 seconds or 60,000 ticks would be 12,000mj.

2) There is a 5% energy loss of the net total of energy produced.
The maximum output of net energy from a single bucket of ethanol is 240,000 mj.
5% of the net total(240,000) is 12,000 mj.

Out of the two scenarios, they both produce they same amount of energy loss while using energy conduits, which way though is correct to think?
Is the energy loss correctly calculated via the net total (240,000 mj for 1 bucket of ethanol) or is it the 5% of energy produced (5% of the 4mj per tick)?

I would love to be enlightened on this subject. If you notice any mistakes in my mathematics please politely point them out, I am only human, mistakes are completely fine.

-Keynah
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Edit: 3:15pm 6/28/2013
I have done some more testing with ethanol and combustion engines

Test One
-How much does each 1mB of ethanol produce in a combustion engine?
What I did was I took a portable tank and using NBTedit In-game edited the file so the tank was only full with 100ml of ethanol. Then I ported 100mB into the combustion engine and watched the heat level rise. After about 1 to 2 mins. The engine stopped pumping and I looked at the amount of energy produced. There was a redstone energy cell directly in front of the engine, allowing for all the power to be pumped inside. I was shocked by the result, 22,400 mj were created as a result of 100mB of ethanol.

Some mathematical things that I figured:
240,000 mj are produced from 1,000mB of ethanol
Then 240,000 mj / 1,000 mB = 240 mj per 1mB is true how much per 1mB.
But [1mB]240 mj * 100mB = 100 mB or 24,000 mj.

Strange, my results showed that only 22,400 out of 24,000 mj were stored in the energy cell. Hmm..
5% loss maybe,
0.05 * 24,000 = 1,200 mj loss
24,000 -1,200 = 22,400 mj total.

As a result, even with the direct input into the redstone energy cell, there is still a 5% loss of energy. I only thought that was with the conduits from early testing, not the cell directly. I may have to go bug KingLemming soon to see if this is intentional or not.
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TL;DR
-Ethanol produces 240,000 mj per one bucket in a combustion engine
-One bucket of ethanol will burn in a combustion engine for about 50mins
-Using Thermal Expansion energy conduits or redstone energy cell will net a 5% loss of energy even if the engine is directly hooked up to the cell.
-Testing to find the initial amount of ethanol need to warm-up a combustion engine.
 
At a code level, conduits act on a per-tick (rather, per-event, but this event occurs on every tick or every-certain-number of ticks) basis. Mathematically, it doesn't matter.
 
Thank you for your reply. As I was doing the math, I thought it would only work the first way since the second way seemed illogical in my opinion. By the way do you know how to calculate fuel lost per warm-up stage?
 
If you use a current version of TE for MineCraft 1.5.2 (2.4.5.0 and newer):
-Changed: Conduits and Energy Cells are now lossless. (Source)
 
By the way do you know how to calculate fuel lost per warm-up stage?
At least with combustion engines, warm-up more directly affects the rate that energy can be pulled from the energy, rather than the rate the engine converts fuel into energy for internal storage. This only normally matters if you have a large set of engines feeding a smaller number of devices, but can cause power loss in those situations..
If you use a current version of TE for MineCraft 1.5.2 (2.4.5.0 and newer):
-Changed: Conduits and Energy Cells are now lossless.
Ah, thanks. Didn't realize that change had been released.