questions about biomass production

[yuval3210]

Hi there,
I've been working on a biomass -> biofuel -> steam production system

The system works like this: I have 4 fermenters:
- 1 is running on birch saplings from an automatic tree farm
- 1 is running on rubber saplings from an automatic tree farm
- 2 are running on sugar canes from a HUGE automatic farm

The biomass is stored in an iron tank. It then goes into 3 working stills which produce the biofuel.
The biofuel is stored in an iron tank. After that it gets into a 36 HP boiler. The steam from the boiler goes to some industrial steam engines, where some of them are powering the fermenters and the stills.

Now, I read somewhere that a single fermenter can produce enough biomass for 4 stills. But this is not the case for me. If i turn on more than 3 stills I start losing biomass. For some reason the biomass production is not fast enough.

I have a few problems with my setup:
- The sapling production is too slow for the fermenters (even though i read that one tree farm should be enough for a single fermenter)
- The sugar cane production, however, seems to be fast, but they dont seem to produce enough biomass. I was thinking it might be because of the amount of MJ/t that the fermenters recieves, but it seems unlikely ( I have an 50MJ/t powerline connecting all of the farms, the fermenter and the stills).

So, there a few questions I wanted to ask:
1. Should i focus on only one type of resource for the fermenters? (Sugar cane, saplings, etc...)
2. Is there a limitation for the max MJ/t fermenters can recieve? (I understand that the more power the fermenter gets, the faster it works. So maybe I should just work and a more powerful powerline, so that the sugar cane fermenters will work faster.
3. If I'll add another sugar cane fermenter to the same powerline, will the system work better (For example, do 3 fermenters working on a 10 MJ/t powerline (that means 3.33MJ/t each) work better than 2 fermenters on a 10MJ/t powerline (which is 5MJ/t each) ? )

Sorry for the long post, but I really want to fully understand how the fermenters work so I could optimise my system.

Thanks in advance!!!

 

[MilConDoin]

One fermenter with saplings, water and mulch can feed ~4.5 stills, when supplied with max power (16 or 17 MJ/t, not sure). I've never tried, if resources with a lower biomass yield will be slower. A fermenter with 3.33MJ/t should take thrice the time than one with 10 MJ/t, so one fermenter with 10 or 3 with 3.33 shouldn't make a difference.

What kind of tree farm do you have? A SC tree farm has been nerfed in one of the last updates. It is only half as fast as before and more leafs (and some wood) than before keep standing.

About the shared powerline: 3 stills need 15 MJ/t together, each fermenter would need 16 (or 17) MJ/t for max speed and your farms also need some power. Can 50 MJ/t feed them all?

 

[yuval3210]

Wow, thanks for the quick response.
I'm using a forestry tree farm (logger and arboretum).
Thanks for the numbers, I really didnt know the amount of MJ every machine requires.
I think I will make a seperate power line just for the fermenters + stills, now that I know how much power i need. I'll also probably make another tree farm for the saplings, (It's not that expensive when you have a quarry =] ). I don't know why 1 farm is not enough, but I guess I'll just build another.

One quick question though: How did you find those numbers? I tried to find How much MJ/t several machines need, but I couldn't find it (Stuff like Logger, Arboretum, Fermenter ... )

Thanks for the awesome reply

 

[Hoff]

I would also suggest delving into other mods to check out other types of farms to find your favorite. There are tons of tutorials for Steves carts tree farms Minefactory reloaded is pretty simple once you play with them a little bit and there are even other methods of creating bio fuel.

 

[Hydra]

I did some investigating into fermenting speed a while ago: http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/some-fermenting-science.9029/

 

[MilConDoin]

Part of my information was gathered by simply trying it out and looking at numbers and timing. They were verified and added to with Hydras work.

 

[yuval3210]

These were some very interesting comments.

Hoff: thanks for the suggestion, but I'm playing on a mindcrack server, so no SteveCarts =P. I might look into other mods though to see if they have anything intersting.
Hydra: Wow that was great! The numbers in there are really interesting.

I now have 2 questions:
1. Hydra, I saw you wrote that 2 complete sugar cane farms cannot keep up with a fully powered fermenter. I was wondering if a forestry tree farm could be capable of keeping up with a fully powered sapling fermenter (It uses a sapling per 4.5 seconds).
2. hydra and MilConDoin, How could you gather information about how much MJ/t a machine uses. Did you use a redstone energy cell, and calculated (amount of MJ used)/(time elapsed)? Or did you have an easier way?

 

[Skirty_007]

Our server used to be Mindcrack, and had Steve's carts. Has it been removed?

 

[yuval3210]

oops, my bad
Steve's carts mod does exist on the server, for some reason I thought it doesn't..

Well, guess I should look into this mod a bit =]

 

[snooder]

2. hydra and MilConDoin, How could you gather information about how much MJ/t a machine uses. Did you use a redstone energy cell, and calculated (amount of MJ used)/(time elapsed)? Or did you have an easier way?

I'm not sure if this is the way they did it, but you can use the Multimeter from Thermal Expansion to measure how much MJ a machine is using at a given time if you click on the machine. You can also click on an input/output from a redstone conduit to get a reading of how much MJ is being pumping into/out of the network.

 

[yuval3210]

snooder, thank you very much!!!

I have been looking for a tool like this, but I only found MJ reader, which is deprecated or not in use yet.
I'm gonna make one right away, thanks

 

[MilConDoin]

2. hydra and MilConDoin, How could you gather information about how much MJ/t a machine uses. Did you use a redstone energy cell, and calculated (amount of MJ used)/(time elapsed)? Or did you have an easier way?

I put a fully charged RE Cell besides a fermenter, fed it with water, mulch (or rather fertilizer back then, scaled back to 6/7 for the slower mulch) and 10 saplings. Took the time and looked at the MJ used. Similar setup for the still. Numbers about how many stills can be fed by a fermenter were then done by simple math.

 

[Hydra]

These were some very interesting comments.

Hoff: thanks for the suggestion, but I'm playing on a mindcrack server, so no SteveCarts =P. I might look into other mods though to see if they have anything intersting.
Hydra: Wow that was great! The numbers in there are really interesting.

I now have 2 questions:
1. Hydra, I saw you wrote that 2 complete sugar cane farms cannot keep up with a fully powered fermenter. I was wondering if a forestry tree farm could be capable of keeping up with a fully powered sapling fermenter (It uses a sapling per 4.5 seconds).
2. hydra and MilConDoin, How could you gather information about how much MJ/t a machine uses. Did you use a redstone energy cell, and calculated (amount of MJ used)/(time elapsed)? Or did you have an easier way?

I haven't looked into saplings because exactly how many you get varies quite a bit depending on what kind of farm. Also: it's based on the old forestry farms that are going away soon. I personally don't really like the new multifarms because they can't be fully automated but I might look into it later.

The amount of power used is simply calculated by using a single RE cell and dividing the power used by the duration. Since 100 cane takes more or less exactly 100 seconds it's very easy to calculate the MJ/second and MJ/tick.

 

[Skirty_007]

I personally don't really like the new multifarms because they can't be fully automated but I might look into it later.

Do you mean "they can be fully automated but you need to ensure there are plenty materials in your system at all times, such as apatite, sand, dirt, etc"? Because the only intervention I have to do with my (100% Orchard) farm currently is to every now and then place apatite and sand in a chest beside a xycraft fabricator which automatically makes fertilizer and then this is pumped into the farm when required. I can even automate that when I get an ae export bus onto the chest/replace the chest with an ae interface (I think I prefer this solution).

 

[Adonis0]

Another method that you can use in judging how much power a machine, or network, uses; attach it to a full Redstone energy cell with more than adequate input of energy going to the redstone energy cell.

Then simply lower the input while keeping the output at 100MJ/t. Eventually you'll get to a number which it starts decreasing at, if you go up one MJ/t then it should simply be static, and that's the amount of usage the machine (or network) on the other side of the redstone energy cell is using. if it's not static for a network, that means you're using somewhere inbetween that amount, such as 4.7 or 3.4 MJ/t due to redstone energy conduits.