Reactorcraft Heat Exchanger

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Demosthenex

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Jul 29, 2019
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While testing out Reactorcraft I wanted to try using sodium boilers with the fission cores to pull heat at 300C, and then use the heat exchanger to transfer the heat from the sodium to steam boilers using ammonia.

This sounded like a great way to limit how hot the ammonia could get and prevent any kind of explosion.

That didn't work. The heat exchanger could get to 800C!

Do I misunderstand how the HE works? It should just trade heat from the input liquid into heat being transmitted to adjacent blocks. I understand it needs shaft energy to pump, so how can it get hotter than the input temperature?

On that same topic I tried out a CO2 HE and a sodium HE, and it appears that the input heat controls how much hot fluid is created (ie: the same size reactor produces smaller amounts of hot CO2 @ 800C vs larger amounts of hot sodium @ 300C).

I thought staging the heat output from the reactor could make it more efficient and less dependent on water volume.
 
Pyure

Pyure

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Demosthenex said:
Do I misunderstand how the HE works? It should just trade heat from the input liquid into heat being transmitted to adjacent blocks. I understand it needs shaft energy to pump, so how can it get hotter than the input temperature?
Click to expand...
Maybe the HE greatly increases the pressure on the liquid? :p No idea.


@Reika, pardon the call: I wonder if you could shed some input on the sodium/heat exchanger thing.

I think we realize that "carrying" the temperature of the sodium from the reactor to the heat exchanger is probably impossible; from what I can tell, "hot sodium" is just a sort of fuel that is used by the HE to create very high temperatures.

One less-appealing solution I can think of would be to have another liquid: "Very Hot Sodium" vs "Hot Sodium". I can think of a dozen reasons this would be terrible to implement.

Alternately, do you think it would be at all worthwhile to make the HE produce less heat if fueled by hot sodium? I have two potential reasons for this:
1) Most players will never create hot molten sodium at anything close to 800C, so its easy to justify a lower output temperature at the HE
2) Breeder reactors (which are the usual source of hot sodium) really don't need to output quite as much power as they currently do. Lower temperatures would create lower power output.

And one potential concern against:
1) May allow players to add an ammonia loop as an exploit (if that's unwanted by you)
 
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Demosthenex

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Jul 29, 2019
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I don't see it as a fuel because it isn't consumed. The HE and liquids are a way to move heat from one place to another. I see four options, CO2, molten sodium, water and ammonia. Only water doesn't need a closed loop.

Each liquid carries a different amount of heat per bucket. I would expect all of them to be usable with any of the Reactorcraft blocks. I know Reika's had to nerf lava and fire as heat sources.

This is why the current behavior surprised me. The HE shouldn't be able to exceed the input liquid temperature. It should be less effective at producing cooled liquid if it's not shedding heat quickly enough vs the temperature of the input liquid.

I thought it quite reasonable to use sodium as a first-stage for cooling because it should require less volume than water to carry the same heat energy, which can then be processed with water or ammonia for steam.

The reason that would be great for steam is that if the HE could never get hotter than the max sodium temperature, it would make ammonia use that much safer.
 
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Demosthenex

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Jul 29, 2019
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That's fine. One of my prior questions had been whether each cooling solution was locked to a specific type. I thought it would be quite interesting if all the cooling types worked with all the reactor types, or perhaps you had to choose one with a high enough temperature to work with a specific reactor (ie: the pebble bed ran hot, so required CO2).

Is there a reason why you think they should be locked, rather than generic means of heat transfer?
 
Reika

Reika

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Demosthenex said:
That's fine. One of my prior questions had been whether each cooling solution was locked to a specific type. I thought it would be quite interesting if all the cooling types worked with all the reactor types, or perhaps you had to choose one with a high enough temperature to work with a specific reactor (ie: the pebble bed ran hot, so required CO2).

Is there a reason why you think they should be locked, rather than generic means of heat transfer?
Click to expand...
Because real reactors use one and only one coolant type per reactor type. For example, as was established earlier, the breeder reactors do not use water because that absorbs neutrons.
 
Pyure

Pyure

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Aug 14, 2013
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Demosthenex said:
Is there a reason why you think they should be locked, rather than generic means of heat transfer?
Click to expand...
Reika wants the habitants of MineCraftia to have identical technology to Earth :p

Reika said:
I see a bigger problem. Sodium boilers should not work in normal fission reactors, period.
Click to expand...
Joking aside, I always like to look at the larger picture. Instead if saying "sodium boilers should not work in normal fission reactors", I ask myself, "could an idiot make a half-assed fission reactor using sodium if he needed to?"

20 years later, I still design my game code around that viewpoint. The result is win-win for all concerned: more possibilities, more creativity, and frankly a lot more realism.

Edit: Hopefully idiots are not actually assembling real-life nuclear reactors of any kind...
 
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