Need help with Big Reactor turbines

[McJty]

Hi all,

I have good experience with passive Big Reactors but it is time I went into the active ones (using steam and turbines). There is a lot of information on the web available on this but I found nothing that (for me at least) clarifies it sufficiently so that I can apply that info to my particular situation.

I currently have a 9x9x9 passive big reactor with 24 fuel rods (checkerboard pattern) and enderfluid as coolant. This produces 42000RF/tick and I'm pretty happy with that. But just for learning purposes I'd like to know how to do the active reactor so I would like to add turbines. I already have several stacks of cyanite so I should be good in that area.

I saw in the GUI that I have about 1000mb/tick steam production. I also saw somewhere that I'll need 40 blades to handle that (25mb steam per blade). Is that right?

So what would the ideal turbine setup be for this? How many coils? How many propellors and how many blades? Also two or one turbine?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Peppe]

Note the GUI on the reactor only shows the steam per tick it could send. This is limited by how much water it has available and if it can send steam anywhere.

A 42000RF passive reactor should translate to a little less than that in steam per tick.

Each turbine max can use 2000 mb of steam per tick. You are correct each blade uses 25mb of steam. Blades rotate the shaft and coils slow down/fight the rotation to generate power.

The spreadsheets can help you find coil + blade combinations that you can afford and that will be near the optimal speed breakpoints. Turbines produce the most power ~900 RPM and 1800 RPM. Turbine sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...UxOUGxMRlpERWtPMmtGT213bmc&toomany=true#gid=1
Only deals in full coils, so sometimes there is some wiggle room for partial coil near 80 blades.

I would lean toward 72-80 blade setups and the best coil you can afford. Enderium is the best and I like electrum as a good interim material. I like to make a 9x9x14 turbine. In the mid game it was 6 full electrum coils + 72 blades = 14k RF/t with steam trimmed to keep it around 1800 RPM and then end game I swapped the coil to Enderuim. 5 coils with 3 block removed (37 blocks total) and with a coil removed I could fit the last blades to reach 80. Enderium upgrade then produced ~24k RF/t.

 

[McJty]

On the BR wiki it says that the fantasy metals are even better then enderium blocks but not sure if they're enabled on the server that I play. Also it is a bit harder to get that

But thanks for the tips in any case.

 

[Peppe]

On the BR wiki it says that the fantasy metals are even better then enderium blocks but not sure if they're enabled on the server that I play. Also it is a bit harder to get that

But thanks for the tips in any case.

Yeah i have never tried the fantasy materials. This page has some info on them and they all seem to actually be below enderium in turbines you can actually build.

http://ftbwiki.org/Big_Reactors/HighestPowerData

 

[McJty]

I'm close to giving up on turbines all together. I have not found a single page that actually explains what all the factors and contributing things are. Just spreadsheets with tables but no real info.

Maybe it will help if I ask a number of concrete questions:

• I have a 9x9x9 but I see in the spreadsheet on active cooled reactors an example of 9x9x3 (3 height). What exactly is the advantage/disadvantage of increasing the heigh (only the height) of a reactor? Both for active as for passive.
• When you have a passive reactor, how do you actually judge how good that reactor will be when it is converted to active?
• When you have a passive reactor that performs very well (like in my case, the 9x9x9 with 24 control rods (checkerboard), enderium fluid which gives me 42000RF/tick) does that also mean it will perform well when active? How and why is there a difference here?
• Why is it good to keep heat low? For me that's not intuitive as you need a lot of heat to make steam.
• Why is it good to have water from the turbine pumped back into the reactor? Why not just get rid of that water from the steam turbine? What's the advantage?
• How can you calculate how much RF/tick a given build of a turbine can produce at maximum? i.e. say you know how many blades there are and the kind of material you're using for the coils.
• What is the relevance of the size of the base of a turbine. i.e. 5x5, 7x7 or even larger. How does that affect performance of a turbine?

Note that I don't really care about fuel consumption as I have a fast magical crops uranium production going on that can produce yellorium much faster then even the most resource hungry 9x9x9 reactor can consume and I'm also reprocessing the cyanite into blutonium and also feeding that in the reactor.

Maybe the answers to these questions can get me a bit further along. So far I have only been able to get 15000 RF/tick out of my turbine and that is consuming (as far as I can see) all steam that my reactor produces. That means I would have to improve matters at least 3 times to be better then my passive reactor.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Adonis0]

Disclaimer: These answers have been entirely based on my experience in building a turbine for AgS and the testing I put into it during building
Much pain was had to obtain these results (See here)

I'm close to giving up on turbines all together. I have not found a single page that actually explains what all the factors and contributing things are. Just spreadsheets with tables but no real info.

Maybe it will help if I ask a number of concrete questions:

• I have a 9x9x9 but I see in the spreadsheet on active cooled reactors an example of 9x9x3 (3 height). What exactly is the advantage/disadvantage of increasing the heigh (only the height) of a reactor? Both for active as for passive.

Advantage: you can still upgrade your power production if you can't fit it in a wider area
Disadvantage: it's taller

When you have a passive reactor, how do you actually judge how good that reactor will be when it is converted to active?

Not entirely sure, but it will always produce more power, not entirely certain how much more (the one I built recently produced ~25% more power with one turbine built, I could definitely build another)

EDIT: I'm judging this by the heat of the reactor, the more steam it's producing, the more it is cooled, and it's still well above the heat it was stable at before i turned it into an active reactor

When you have a passive reactor that performs very well (like in my case, the 9x9x9 with 24 control rods (checkerboard), enderium fluid which gives me 42000RF/tick) does that also mean it will perform well when active? How and why is there a difference here?

Same as above, active will always produce more power if you use all the steam you're producing

Why is it good to keep heat low? For me that's not intuitive as you need a lot of heat to make steam.

This is where separation between casing heat, and core heat comes into play. Casing heat is intuitive, the higher it is, the more steam, therefore more power. BUT, with the core heat, more heat means higher reaction rates, therefore you use more fuel. The idea of the coolant generally is actually to transfer heat to the outer casing more than to actually cool.

Why is it good to have water from the turbine pumped back into the reactor? Why not just get rid of that water from the steam turbine? What's the advantage?

As the steam is only turning a turbine, it's not actually getting used up, so this means you only need to pump some water in initially and if it's returned (through sufficiently high throughput methods) it will form a closed loop and you never have to worry about water again. But if you're getting rid of the water from the turbine, then you need to come up with large amounts of water from somewhere (for instance with my one turbine it consumes 1.7 buckets/t)

How can you calculate how much RF/tick a given build of a turbine can produce at maximum? i.e. say you know how many blades there are and the kind of material you're using for the coils.

It's a set ratio. Additional turbine blades (given enough steam) will speed up the rotor, coils provide a drag on the rotor and produce RF based on their material. As far as I can see, it's entirely linear with its ratio, if you have a set-up which works with 20 blades, and 8 coils producing 5k/t, a set-up of 40 blades and 16 coils will produce 10k/t and consume twice the amount of steam.

What is the relevance of the size of the base of a turbine. i.e. 5x5, 7x7 or even larger. How does that affect performance of a turbine?

No effect on performance as far as I can tell, the effect is the cost. A turbine with a 5x5 base will have a single column of empty spaces on each corner, while 7x7 will have four on each corner. So you have to build vastly more parts to have most of the internal space being void.

An Ending note, it seems the reactor only ever produces 50mb/t more than what can be consumed until it reaches its own production threshold, I found with my investigation, my reactor with nothing hooked up to it only ever produced 50mb/t, but as soon as I added a turbine, it began producing what the turbine consumed + 50mb/t.

 

[McJty]

Disclaimer: These answers have been entirely based on my experience in building a turbine for AgS and the testing I put into it during building
Much pain was had to obtain these results (See here)


Advantage: you can still upgrade your power production if you can't fit it in a wider area
Disadvantage: it's taller

Ok, but say I have a reactor of 3 height (that means the control rods are 1 height). If I increase the height of that reactor to 4 (so double the control rod area) I guess you need twice as much fuel inside the reactor but can I also expect double RF/tick or steam/tick output with double that internal height?

This is where separation between casing heat, and core heat comes into play. Casing heat is intuitive, the higher it is, the more steam, therefore more power. BUT, with the core heat, more heat means higher reaction rates, therefore you use more fuel. The idea of the coolant generally is actually to transfer heat to the outer casing more than to actually cool.

So if you don't care about fuel (i.e. you have more fuel than you would ever need) you don't actually have to worry about heat at all? In that case more heat == better. Right?

As the steam is only turning a turbine, it's not actually getting used up, so this means you only need to pump some water in initially and if it's returned (through sufficiently high throughput methods) it will form a closed loop and you never have to worry about water again. But if you're getting rid of the water from the turbine, then you need to come up with large amounts of water from somewhere (for instance with my one turbine it consumes 1.7 buckets/t)

I'm now currently pumping in water from the ocean below my reactor with a transfer node from ExtraUtilities. The water buffer is always full in my reactor so can I then assume that I don't actually need that feedback loop and I can simply just use that single pump?

It's a set ratio. Additional turbine blades (given enough steam) will speed up the rotor, coils provide a drag on the rotor and produce RF based on their material. As far as I can see, it's entirely linear with its ratio, if you have a set-up which works with 20 blades, and 8 coils producing 5k/t, a set-up of 40 blades and 16 coils will produce 10k/t and consume twice the amount of steam.

Ah, and how do you know that a coil is producing some RF/tick? Is there a table of what materials produce what RF/tick per block somewhere?

No effect on performance as far as I can tell, the effect is the cost. A turbine with a 5x5 base will have a single column of empty spaces on each corner, while 7x7 will have four on each corner. So you have to build vastly more parts to have most of the internal space being void.

So there is absolutely no advantage in making a 7x7 turbine as opposed to 5x5? I find that a bit strange...

Thanks for all the answers though.

 

[Adonis0]

Ok, but say I have a reactor of 3 height (that means the control rods are 1 height). If I increase the height of that reactor to 4 (so double the control rod area) I guess you need twice as much fuel inside the reactor but can I also expect double RF/tick or steam/tick output with double that internal height?

Hesitant yes..? Not entirely certain, but you'll definitely get an increase in power production and fuel consumption, but I'm not certain it's a straight doubling. Report back if you try.

So if you don't care about fuel (i.e. you have more fuel than you would ever need) you don't actually have to worry about heat at all? In that case more heat == better. Right?

I would say so

I'm now currently pumping in water from the ocean below my reactor with a transfer node from ExtraUtilities. The water buffer is always full in my reactor so can I then assume that I don't actually need that feedback loop and I can simply just use that single pump?

If it's capable of bringing in enough water per tick sure. As my design was limited to using Aqueous accumulators (Playing Agrarian Skies) the loop was essential, but by the sounds of things it's not for you.

Ah, and how do you know that a coil is producing some RF/tick? Is there a table of what materials produce what RF/tick per block somewhere?

I think how it works is the coils produce RF/t dependent on the speed of the rotor. it'd be easier to base it off a single speed, and build some replica turbines in creative only changing the coil type, I personally have only tried enderium (can't give you the numbers for it because the server is offline at the moment and I'm about to go to bed)

I can't answer about the table, I wasn't able to find one in the quick look up I did before giving up and testing myself

So there is absolutely no advantage in making a 7x7 turbine as opposed to 5x5? I find that a bit strange...

There is, because you're able to build the rotor blades to being two long instead of one long, so the advantage is it doesn't need to be as excessively tall to fit in the same amount of rotor blades (also there's height limiting in the configs). I guess you're paying more resources for aesthetics?

 

[McJty]

There is, because you're able to build the rotor blades to being two long instead of one long, so the advantage is it doesn't need to be as excessively tall to fit in the same amount of rotor blades (also there's height limiting in the configs). I guess you're paying more resources for aesthetics?

Ah! That's important information I was missing! I had no idea you could even make the blades longer! That's VERY useful to know and makes a big difference. Thanks!

 

[Peppe]

Heat in the reactor does not equal more steam production. The heat you see in the controller is waste heat.

If you build it passive you will see high heat kills reactivity and reduces total power ouput -- this holds true with active cooling. You will produce more steam per area if you have a well cooled reactor.

A generally rule of thumb on active to passive is about an 7-8x gain. So a 42k Rf/t passive reactor is probably going to produce enough steam to run about 14 turbines each consuming 2k steam a tick. You want to recycle water from the turbine because creating 28 buckets of water per tick is probably going to be more lag than it is worth.

Active cooled reactors will only ever output the amount of steam that can be received. If you want to see what your reactor can do at max, then output the steam to a nullifier. In creative you can use a creative coolant port to test how the reactor performs when it has enough water.

The mod only allows 2k steam into a turbine. A turbine blade consumes ~25mb of steam per tick, which is why 80 is the max. Blades spin the rotor faster and coils slow it down and produce power. The spreadsheets help find optimal blade and coil material configurations. Size of the turbine has no affect other than you need to be able to fit everything in the turbine housing. Usually this means 7x7 or 9x9 to fit more blades in the limited rotor area.

 

[McJty]

A generally rule of thumb on active to passive is about an 7-8x gain. So a 42k Rf/t passive reactor is probably going to produce enough steam to run about 14 turbines each consuming 2k steam a tick. You want to recycle water from the turbine because creating 28 buckets of water per tick is probably going to be more lag than it is worth.

Why does pumping cool water from below cause more lag then pumping the water out of the turbine? Isn't that the same amount of water that you need and the same kind of pump (liquid transfer node in my case)? I don't understand why that would cause more lag. I would just say the opposite since I'm only going to need one pump and not two for water input into the reactor.

Active cooled reactors will only ever output the amount of steam that can be received. If you want to see what your reactor can do at max, then output the steam to a nullifier. In creative you can use a creative coolant port to test how the reactor performs when it has enough water.

That's a good tip.

Thanks for the help!

 

[rhn]

Why does pumping cool water from below cause more lag then pumping the water out of the turbine? Isn't that the same amount of water that you need and the same kind of pump (liquid transfer node in my case)? I don't understand why that would cause more lag. I would just say the opposite since I'm only going to need one pump and not two for water input into the reactor.

It is a matter of difference between how you generate the water and how you transfer the water back from the turbine. Reusing the water from the turbine(s) can be done directly by facing the fluid ports against each other(have reactor directly adjacent to turbine(s)), or by use of Tesseracts as they have no bandwidth restrictions. This will produce no lag worth mentioning.

Only real way of producing all that water constantly is through either have a ton of something working at a moderately pace or have a few working really fast. Both are really bad for performance.

 

[Capital_Mayhem]

I have a question regarding the coolant ports: do turbine/ reactor coolant ports have any sort of limit to the amount of fluid they can transport per tick? Also, if you produce more than 2k steam per tick is the only way to use all of the steam multiple turbines?

 

[Adonis0]

I have a question regarding the coolant ports: do turbine/ reactor coolant ports have any sort of limit to the amount of fluid they can transport per tick? Also, if you produce more than 2k steam per tick is the only way to use all of the steam multiple turbines?

No, and yes

 

[McJty]

It is a matter of difference between how you generate the water and how you transfer the water back from the turbine. Reusing the water from the turbine(s) can be done directly by facing the fluid ports against each other(have reactor directly adjacent to turbine(s)), or by use of Tesseracts as they have no bandwidth restrictions. This will produce no lag worth mentioning.

Only real way of producing all that water constantly is through either have a ton of something working at a moderately pace or have a few working really fast. Both are really bad for performance.

Ok, but I still don't get why a fully upgraded liquid transfer node would be bad. In my case it keeps the water tank constantly full and all sources I find on the internet say that these transfer nodes are very light on lag.

Edit: a few questions about tesseracts. I can use the tesseracts to get water from the turbine back into the reactor but can I also use a tesseract for transfering the steam? Also do I need separate channels for every turbine? I mean can I just let my reactor dump steam into a tesseract and then connect multiple turbines to that same channel? Same for the other diection. Do I need multiple tesseract channels for getting water back into the reactor?

Thanks!

 

[Peppe]

Ok, but I still don't get why a fully upgraded liquid transfer node would be bad. In my case it keeps the water tank constantly full and all sources I find on the internet say that these transfer nodes are very light on lag.

Edit: a few questions about tesseracts. I can use the tesseracts to get water from the turbine back into the reactor but can I also use a tesseract for transfering the steam? Also do I need separate channels for every turbine? I mean can I just let my reactor dump steam into a tesseract and then connect multiple turbines to that same channel? Same for the other diection. Do I need multiple tesseract channels for getting water back into the reactor?

Thanks!

Turbines can share channels.

You can do 2-3 channels
1 water
1 steam
1 energy

There is no limit on the throughput of liquids, so the tesseracts will scale however many turbines you need.
Energy could be on the same channel as one of the above -- i will often pair it with water as usually somewhere I need water is also somewhere I need some energy.

Not sure the current energy limit on tesseracts. I believe each tesseract will only output 50k, so you may need multiple in a spot to dump all the power.

 

[McJty]

Thanks for that. I will not use tesseracts for power though. I'm using the 20Krf/tick enderio conduits and multiple output ports. I actually like the look of cables and the more industrial feel that gives.

 

[Adonis0]

Not sure the current energy limit on tesseracts. I believe each tesseract will only output 50k, so you may need multiple in a spot to dump all the power.

As far as I know, throughput is unlimited for energy too, so it's only limited by what can receive it. Which in thermal expansion by itself is 60kRf/t (a 10k conduit on each face).

 

[rhn]

Ok, but I still don't get why a fully upgraded liquid transfer node would be bad. In my case it keeps the water tank constantly full and all sources I find on the internet say that these transfer nodes are very light on lag.

They are light on lag, until you upgrade them to work a gazillion times per second(exaggeration). Every time they do something, the server/PC needs to perform calculations on it like: first create the water, then scan along ALL connected pipes to find a valid destination for it, then transfer it. This is MUCH more resource intensive than just transferring fluids around in tesseracts/direct connections. Due to large "packet sizes" it can just transfer all the water a few times per second.

 

[McJty]

Ok, I got some success to report. My original passive reactor did about 42000 RF/tick. I switched it to active and checked what the steam output was with a nullifier at the end and it came at 8000 mb/tick. That means that I should be able to power about 4 turbines with that amount of steam (given the maximum of 2000 mb/tick per turbine).

So I build two turbines already. 7x7x16 in dimension. 4 coils of enderium blocks and 80 rotor blades. I used tesseracts to pump steam into them and water out into the reactor. I used transfer node for the initial input of water into the bigreactor.

Each turbine gives about 20900 RF/tick so that means that my two turbines are about as good now as my original passive reactor. Both turbines are set at 1800 mb/tick steam input which seems to give the best result. So that means I'm not even using half of the steam so I should be able to add two more turbines to this setup. I will try this soon.

Thanks for all the advice!