Self-Sustaining Closed-Loop Lava Turbine Generator

[Phoxtane]

Hello all!

There's a very interesting section in the wiki article on the MFR Steam Boiler machine - specifically, that it can be used to create a 'self-sustaining energy source'...

More specifically, it says that using a Lava Fabricator and a Fluid Transposer to fuel a MFR Steam Boiler can produce enough steam for up to five MFR Steam Turbines, which produces an excess of RF beyond what's needed to power the system. I've abandoned three worlds recently due to how slow the progression in IC2 solar panel power systems is, and this is my test setup:

I've folded and compressed the system a bit from the original loop to make it more compact, so here's more pictures that should help show what it looks like.

Currently, the system is running with the MFR Steam Boiler at maximum temperature, and has been doing so for a quite a while with no issues.

You'll need four Aqueous Accumulators in order to supply the amount of water that this system needs - I have no idea if the water setup can be any more compact, as they seem to produce water the fastest when surrounded by source blocks on all four sides.

How it works:
A bucket is placed in the Fluid Transposer, which has inputs on the top (for the bucket) and on one side (for the Lava Fabricator, via Hardened Fluiduct). The output is on the bottom, where an Itemduct sends the bucket into the MFR Steam Boiler. There the boiler consumes the lava bucket, where it's then extracted via Buildcraft pipes and sent back to the Fluid Transposer for refilling. Simple enough, except I can't get the auto-export function of the Itemducts to work properly, so I have to resort to pipes.

The water supply is provided by four Aqueous Accumulators sending water through Hardened Fluiducts. It's important to note that if the boiler runs out of water - for example, if there aren't enough accumulators and the fluiduct runs dry - it'll send steam out into the water line and back it up! It's very important to have enough water coming in so that this doesn't happen, and to build from the accumulators to the boiler instead of the other way around so that steam doesn't have a chance to get into the fluiducts.

Lastly, power generation is handled by sending out steam via fluiduct to five Steam Turbines. Redstone Energy Fluxducts send the power through a Redstone Energy cell, which sends the energy out again to the Lava Fabricator and the Fluid Transposer.

The energy cell acts as a buffer to keep things humming along smoothly (for example, if you need to move a turbine for whatever reason). It's important to note that this device only produces an excess of power once the Fluid Transposer and Lava Fabricator are completely backed up with lava, as it's only at that point that the Fabricator will put itself into idle mode. I think the break-even point for this setup is around three turbines, at which point the Lava Fabricator will start producing more lava than is consumed by the boiler.

You'll have to prime the system with lava or some sort of fuel in order to get the system up to temperature to produce steam.

At this point, I need three things: 1) How much excess power does this produce, 2) Can the design be built any smaller, and 3) What's the overall material cost for this setup?

 

[Inaeo]

This is a similar setup to one I posted (and has since been buried) in General Chat back in July. My pics were taken from our Infinity Server (pre-Expert mode), so your pics come out quite a bit clearer.

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/free-power-the-self-sustaining-turbine.99521/

Since we did some things differently, I'll address those diffences, and why I opted the way I did.

1) I don't see a Turbine. That's just me poking fun. A BR Turbine is a BR Turbine, right? A max sized Turbine using Ludicrite put out ~24kRF/t using default Infinity configs (many packs will config fuel usage, but leave Turbine output unchanged).

2) I abutted my Turbine to the Boilers. I did this due to throughput issues with most pipes I had tried. When direct connection via Turbine Fluid Ports was unavailable, I opted for XU Transfer Nodes, as they can throughput obnoxious amounts if enough upgrades are used.

3) I originally used EnderIO to transport my buckets, as that system is super easy to get set up. After fiddling with it for a bit, I tore all the EnderIO out and replaced it the Thermal Dynamics. The Retrievers allow you to make the system work reliably with very little thought.

4) I filled my Boilers with XU Transfer Nodes originally. As stated above, they can throughput obnoxious amounts of water, and with a few World Interaction Upgrades, they make for very compact infinite pumps.

4b) I found that once the system was primed, the Turbine actually returned more water than it consumed. This may have been addressed by now, but I ended up using this oversight and a BC Floodgate to feed the excess water to a patch of Botania Hydrangeas (pre-nerf).

Moving on to your questions, since the Lava Fabricator requires 200kRF to produce a Bucket of Lava, the cost is covered in less than half a second (24kRF/t at 20t/s = 480kRF/s). You can actually manage to run three max sized Turbines off a single Fabricator/Transposer setup before they can't keep up demand to the Boilers.

Making the footprint smaller relies mostly on Turbine placement. Strategic planning allows the sharing of Itemducts and Other piping, which would shave a few blocks here and there. The downside to placing them in this manner is having the multiblocks cross chunk boundaries, which some people prefer not to do. You could shave a few blocks space using the above mentioned Fluid Transfer Node with World Interaction Upgrades instead of the Aqueous Accumulators. All in all, I found it more visually appealing to separate the system components (water generation, lava generation, steam generation, power generation, power storage). To each there own.

I've not done a count for materials. I would be interested to see the tally. Keep in mind the Yellorium+Sand=Cyanite recipie, as it cuts out the need for an actual reactor.

My big question for you is, why BC pipes? I love their gates and pipewire, but unless Logistics Pipes are available, I'll choose mkst other piping if given a chance.

 

[Phoxtane]

Good questions!

1) Firstly, I'm not playing FTB Infinity, but a tweaked Direwolf20 pack (with the magic mods disabled, don't want to deal with the Thaumcraft stuff). I suspect this is where most of the differences come from (no idea what BR Turbines are, for that matter...) - there's no multiblock structures in this build. I'm also using MFR Steam Turbines, which are a single-block machine much like the Lava Fabricator or Fluid Transposer.

2) As far as I can tell, Hardened Fluiducts don't seem to limit the transfer rate of steam; at least, not before the turbines start consuming it faster than the boiler can provide it. It also lets me get five turbines hooked up to a boiler, where otherwise I'd only be able to have three connected directly.

3) I haven't delved very deep into the high-end tech trees at all, I tend to get bored right around the point I get a quarry going for whatever reason.

I'll see if I can't run two boiler setups off this lava fabricator. That ought to at least double my power production without causing too many issues... As for Buildcraft pipes, they just *work*; I can't seem to install servos into itemducts to enable auto-export, AND I haven't really played around with other mods's transport systems. It's good fun to watch the bucket loop back, however.

 

[Inaeo]

Ahh, there is our big difference. I was using the created steam to power a Big Reactors Turbine, not sticking with MFR. It seems like a pretty gross oversight that MFR would allow its own blocks to be able to self sustain a net positive feedback loop, but then I feel MFR is pretty much the easy button solution and is rather overpowered as a whole. Not that I don't love MFR for what it is and how simple it is to use (Planter/Harvester are still the simplest way to farm), but I've been dropping it from packs lately so I'm forced to actually use my brain (and other mods).

Big Reactors is an entire mod based around building multiblock reactor setups for gross amounts of RF generation. The reactors are basically just a casing and fuel rods, then the other components can vary wildly with mixed results. Reactors can be built as small as 3x3x3, or can be quite massive and resource intensive. The mod is designed so the waste products from your reactor (Cyanite) is used in the creation of turbines, which allow reactors to be actively cooled using steam production. Since a recipe was added that turns Yellorium directly into Cyanite, and the turbines are compatible with any oreDict Steam, I usually skip the Reactor and power a Turbine with steam generated elsewhere. I used to use RailCraft Boilers, but the MFR Steam Boilers are more efficient, vastly less expensive, and generally less pain in the ass.

Moving on.

Given your setup, a single Steam Boiler produces 400mb/t Steam. That is perfect for five Steam Turbines, which produce 160RF/t (800RF/t between the lot of them). Seeing as the Lava Fabricator requires 2000RF to generate a 1000mb of Lava, it takes just shy of three ticks to generate the needed power. I'm not sure how long a Bucket of Lava burns in a Steam Boiler, but I know its well over that threshold.

Given my previous experiments with the Lava Fabricator/Fluid Transposer, I summised that up to 15 Steam Boilers could be fed with a single Lava generation setup. Unfortunately, due to my needs being Boilers in batches of five (the max sized BR Turbine consumes 2000mb/t, which is five Boilers), I didn't test the exact limitations of the system. However, if we were to assume that 15 Boilers was indeed the maximum, that means up to 75 Steam Turbines could be run with the resultant Steam, for a whopping 12000RF/t. Not exactly a small footprint, but it wouldn't be the largest power system ever built either. Either way, 12kRF/t (minus operational cost of the Fabricator at 2kRF/t, assuming it could output a bucket's worth per tick, and the Fluid Transposer) for free is nothing to shake a stick at.

On second thought, the footprint of your system without the Big Reactors Turbine is actually a smaller footprint, as the space dedicated to a single BR Turbine could effectively house this entire setup. However, adding BR Turbines into the picture does increase power generation to ~72kRF/t given the single Fabricator/Transposer and 15 Steam Boilers.

If I get some free time, maybe I'll do some creative tinkering. Love the theorycrafting side of MC almost as much as playing.

 

[epidemia78]

Attach an EnderIO capacitor bank to the setup so you can see exactly how much RF is coming in. I doubt its very much and honestly MFR blocks are so ugly, I would much rather use some other method for generating power even though this one is free.

 

[Inaeo]

Unfortunately, the power draw from the Lava Fabricator and Fluid Transposer are not static, so the input to the Capacitor Bank would fluctuate depending on their status. A proper ComputerCraft script could compute a running average, however.

 

[Phoxtane]

I've played around a bit and determined that I indeed can run two of these systems off of one Lava Fabricator. Even better, the RF produced from the double setup is enough to run a BC Quarry at full speed, with excess RF left over! If I feel like it, I'll see how much further I can push the Lava Fabricator... I may only go up to four, for the purposes of keeping everything symmetrical and nice.

 

[Inaeo]

As stated above, I have personally tested the Lava Fabricator/Fluid Transposer up to 15 Steam Boilers without issue. Nice to know this system is efficient enough, even without Big Reactors. Also nice to know that you can send buckets back and forth through an EnderChest, so you could power several small setups at various locations before you gain access to Tesseracts.

 

[Phoxtane]

I've started building this in my survival world, and I've managed to shrink it even further. By rotating the Fluid Transposer, I don't need to insert buckets from the top, but from the side - since you can't insert buckets from the front face, all I had to do was turn the Transposer in order to allow for insertion from the side, and move the front face to a direction not in use. This way I've completely eliminated the need for golden BC pipes, and taken an entire block off the height.

I've also moved the water supply in towards the rest of the setup by having the Steam boiler directly over one of the Aqueous Accumulators; if I move them any further in, I will have to apply Filters so that the steam line doesn't connect up with the water lines (generally a bad thing).

I can't put pictures in now since it's a bit hard to get those when the save is on a completely different computer, but if I remember I'll do so later today.

 

[Inaeo]

So, I had a bit to sit down and tinker today. I downloaded a fresh install of the latest DW20 pack, as that was the pack you stated you were playing, and I wanted to limit myself to a similar mod list. I kept each section separated for sake of clarity, but obviously it could be tightened up if your space was limited.

http://imgur.com/a/DtS0G

All in all, this was a fun little project. I'll try to throw together a similar build with a Big Reactor Turbine, and see how it compares.

 

[Inaeo]

To correct myself from my first post, a max sized BR Turbine puts out ~28kRF/t. And I have just confirmed the BR Turbine setup I posted a link to will still work in DW20. Im off to bed, but I'll make it a point to snag some pics when I get the chance. For Science.

Spoiler

Ok, just to prove the point...

(28kRF/t per Turbine * 3 Turbines) - Lava Gen @ 4kRF/t = ~80kRF/t net gain
Only outside cost is enough fuel for getting the Boilers up to temp.

Edit: Updated the imgur album with a bit of Big Reactor info. Enjoy.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Five boilers can run one max-capacity BR Turbine, producing 20k-24k depending on the circumstances. Which is *WELL* in excess of what you have going on here. Your lava production would be able to more than easily keep up with five boilers,

So you can pipe lava directly into boilers? Hmmm... interesting.

Also, even more amusingly... you can use Lava Crystals from Blood Magic to run your boilers with. Assuming you've got your altar set up properly... free energy.

 

[Someone Else 37]

Five boilers can run one max-capacity BR Turbine, producing 20k-24k depending on the circumstances. Which is *WELL* in excess of what you have going on here. Your lava production would be able to more than easily keep up with five boilers,

So you can pipe lava directly into boilers? Hmmm... interesting.

Also, even more amusingly... you can use Lava Crystals from Blood Magic to run your boilers with. Assuming you've got your altar set up properly... free energy.

It looks like they're using lava buckets in the boilers, hence the fluid transposers and itemducts.

There used to be an exploit like this possible with a Railcraft boiler and steam engines, but CovertJaguar nerfed the burn time of lava buckets into oblivion for precisely this reason. I don't believe lava was ever even accepted by the liquid-fueled RC boiler in the first place.

 

[Inaeo]

Indeed, the MFR Steam Boilers only accept solid fuel. I originally had my Boilers fed Blaze Rods from a pair of Blaze Spawners on Cursed Earth, but as we progressed, I began looking for ways to cut lag, and removing mob AI seemed like a good place to start. I began looking for something with as long a burn time as possible, and Vanilla logic brought me to the Lava Buckets. It escalated quickly from there.

This is an exploit, granted, but its nothing that couldn't be accomplished with a small charcoal farm or similar. I was tempted to use the Blood Magic Lava Crystals, running the whole setup off my LP network (powered by a dozen witches in cages over a Well of Suffering), but I never got around to testing sustainability.

Edit: At one point, a mod told me the Burn Time (in ticks) of a given fuel, but I've not seen it lately. Anyone know which mod it was?

 

[Phoxtane]

I think this will be sufficient for my needs currently - it's producing 3200 RF/tick, and I've done away with the Buildcraft items entirely; this mod now relies on Thermal Expansion and Minefactory Reloaded alone, I believe.

 

[Inaeo]

I think this will be sufficient for my needs currently - it's producing 3200 RF/tick, and I've done away with the Buildcraft items entirely; this mod now relies on Thermal Expansion and Minefactory Reloaded alone, I believe.

Not a bad little setup, but I have a few questions.

Why did you decide to use four Fluid Transposers? Was it just for the aesthetics of the symmetry, or were you having issues getting Lava into one at a good pace?

Why did you decide to place the Redstone Torches, when you could have the servos set to either Low or Ignore in Redstone settings for the same result? Again, I'm perfectly happy if the answer is "because it looked cool", but I have a predisposition to avoid Redstone Torches if I can avoid them (having to troubleshoot a system for an hour just to find out someone bumped a torch or spilled some water isn't my idea of fun).

All in all, for a two mod closed-loop system, this is a nice little power plant, with the capacity to expand as your demands increase. Any idea what the estimated resource sink for this little gem has been so far?

 

[Phoxtane]

I've removed the torches as I forgot that you can have them set to ignore redstone signals.

As for the parts list, the build as shown currently requires:
- 44 TE Hardened Fluiducts
- 16 TE Aqueous Accumulators
- 19 TE Redstone Energy Fluxducts
- 8 TE Itemducts
- 4 TE Fluid Transposers
- 4 TE Servos
- 20 MFR Steam Turbines
- 4 MFR Steam Boilers
- 1 MFR Lava Fabricator
- 4 Buckets

As for resource count, that number gets very complicated very quickly, but the most annoying things to build are the steam boilers and the steam turbines, as the steam boilers require a sludge boiler and two reinforced portable tanks apiece and the steam turbines need steam dynamos and a couple of other extras as well. A rough guess gives me five stacks each of iron and copper, two stacks of gold, two stacks of silver, and a lot of redstone - with a bunch of miscellaneous extras, and the ability to make electrum, invar, and hardened glass (easy with Tinker's Construct), as well as a way to fill the redstone energy fluxducts. Potentially all you'd need to build this would be a magma crucible, fluid transposer, and a smeltery, as well as a clockwork engine to power it all until you get your boilers going - two stacks of coal each will get them up to temperature.

 

[Inaeo]

So, I ran some numbers, just out of curiosity, and it ends up that a MFR Steam Turbine is the same intake of steam and the same output of RF as two TE Steam Dynamos. The difference, besides the smaller footprint on the MFR machines, is that the TE Dynamos can be augmented. So, without any game time to confirm...

With three levels of Dynamo Output Power Augments (all three Augments in this category must be present), RF output is increased by a factor of 8 (from 80RF/t to 640RF/t) and base fuel usage is increased by 30% (40mb/t to 52mb/t of steam). If we use the final Augment slot with a Secondary Gearbox (-10% base fuel consumptuon), we can make a single Steam Dynamo output 640RF/t using 48mb/t steam. A single MFR Boiler can then support 8 Steam Dynamos (using a combined 384mb/t of the 400mb/t produced). Since those Dynamos produce 640RF/t, one Boiler can supply enough steam to produce 5120RF/t with 16mb/t steam to spare.

Comparing this to the five MFR Steam Turbines we have been playing with in the above discussion (800RF/t using 400mb/t steam), the net increase is quite substantial, assuming you have the materials and infrastructure to produce the Augments.

I'll see if I can mock something up later tonight to test this new angle. There is a chance my math isn't right, as I've not played extensively with the TE Augments, and now I'm excited to see how far I can push them.

 

[Phoxtane]

Well, I'm certainly not about to tear out my power system (again) and rebuild it any time soon, seeing as I'm not in need of producing six times as much power any time soon... I'll wait on the numbers!

 

[Inaeo]

So, I was correct in assuming that I was mistaken on how the Augments worked, kind of. It turns out that the Dynamo Augmentts consume fuel appropriate for the power generated, but with a base fuel inefficiency built in (x2 power uses x2 fuel, -15% base fuel efficiency). Interestingly enough, fuel efficiency is only calculated on steam generated by a Steam Dynamo, and it has no bearing on steam pumped in from outside sources. This means two things: A) Fuel Efficiency Augments are worthless in a Steam Dynamo while you are pumping steam into them (they would have effect if you were burning solid fuel in them, however), and B) the increased power output of Augments allow for more power per block than the MFR Steam Turbines. Also a note here that the Lava Bucket is not an acceptable fuel for Steam Dynamos, so this little trick cannot be run by Thermal Expansion alone (yes, I tried).

A data breakdown:
A non augmented Dynamo uses half as much steam (40mb/t) and outputs half as much power (80RF/t) as an MFR Steam Turbine. A Level I augment brings them even (80mb/t for 160RF/t) at a more reasonable price point. The Level II augment doubles both intake (160mb/t) and output (320RF/t), and the Level III augment doubles this again (320mb/t for 640RF/t).

The good news is, with the same Steam Generation system as we used in the TE/MFR system before (one Lava Fabricator, one Fluid Transposer, and 16 Steam Boilers), we can now generate the same 12,800RF/t, but we now only need 20 Augmented Steam Dynamos to do it (as opposed to 80 Steam Turbines). The only real limiting factor for this setup, in a Survival world, is the reliance on Blizz, which can occasionally be a pain to find. All other materials needed for the build can be acquired as soon as you have Nether access. The good news there is that the Blizz are only needed for the Level III Augments, so you can make the Steam Dynamos, then upgrade them as you add more Boilers, which allows you to start off small and grow as materials and power needs increase over time.

I edited the findings and associated pictures into the Imgur album. I added the link to my signature back a while ago, and I will attempt to update it as I find new loops and variations.

Edit: Removed crappy attempt at a data table. Inserted written form for clarity's sake.