The Final Word on Steam Boiler Efficiency

[Hydra]

There's no advantage of lossless transportation man, you can always transport the fuel/biofuel with liquid tesseract to destination and then make a remote power system (with combustion engines) at the destination.

You could also do the same with steam. A bit easier to setup because the engines are more "fire and forget" than other engines. Especially combustion engines are more "fire and forget they go boom"

Before I had my second boiler I supplied biomass to some engines in our quarry age but now that I have a second one I just set up a energy tess and supply 50 mj/t to each quarry and cackle maniacally while they tear a 64x64 hole in the scenery at ludicrous speed

 

[Damoklesz]

A large part of it, yes - my base was in a forest biome, so I constantly ran into the stuff from the get-go. I was also running a small quarry in the later stages, but since this was Mindcrack, with GregTech on full hard mode, I had to start processing bauxite before even thinking about building it.

And yes, in that situation I just wanted maximum energy output. I had resources overflowing in their chests, but needed massive EU to drive the GregTech matter fabricator in order to produce iridium. Building the boiler was essentially pocket change, and just one of several measures I took to boost energy generation.

I guess that makes sense. I haven't though of a situation like that, and I still believe that not many actually exist. I mean I could still try to calculate how much thermal generators you could have made using that "pocket change" of resources you spent on getting less then 100 EU/t (more than 4... ), but I don't want to be THAT person... you know the annoying one, who wants to do everything as efficiently as possible.

You could also do the same with steam. A bit easier to setup because the engines are more "fire and forget" than other engines. Especially combustion engines are more "fire and forget they go boom"

Before I had my second boiler I supplied biomass to some engines in our quarry age but now that I have a second one I just set up a energy tess and supply 50 mj/t to each quarry and cackle maniacally while they tear a 64x64 hole in the scenery at ludicrous speed

Combustion engines can be set to "fire and forget" relatively easy. I believe 1 Aqueous Accumulator can support 4 Combustion Engines. If you have more than that, then you need more AA, and you also need to be careful how you place your liquiducts to avoid making a bottleneck somewhere. Yeah, they have an annoying cooldown period when you turn them off, but it's still a lot better than turning off steam.

 

[Omicron]

I guess that makes sense. I haven't though of a situation like that, and I still believe that not many actually exist. I mean I could still try to calculate how much thermal generators you could have made using that "pocket change" of resources you spent on getting less then 100 EU/t (more than 4... ), but I don't want to be THAT person... you know the annoying one, who wants to do everything as efficiently as possible.

Yeah, I also had thermal generators - though not quite as many as some people, because I just pump overworld lakes. Nether pumping is just too cheesy for my tastes.

And a set of (slightly nerfed) advanced solar panels.

And a nuclear reactor.

That matter fab eats a loooot of power

 

[WTFFFS]

I had multiple boilers and yeah 36LP boilers are really just pocket change with Gregtech default\Forestry hardmode, steel is harder to come by than iron especially with TE ore gen active iron spawns at both levels you have to mine at so you end up with a lot, but I did also have a couple of 36HP boilers cause if you are going at all go large.....(hence my 32 Thermals with another 32 ready to setup when the world died, cheesy yeah but playing on hard difficulty and having to play Ghast tennis while building the pump station is a bit of fun ). Though I don't use quarries for resource gathering they really don't sit well with me, RP2 TBM though? oh yeah, a dual head design with 2 9x10 heads supplied a lot of the resources I used.
Truthfully given the resources involved having a set of turbines in addition to a set of thermal gens is rather easy since they really do not share any resources and you may as well feed the matter fab with as much as possible.

 

[Zjarek_S]

I only have one question, because I'm too lazy to calculate it myself, especially that cool down phase seem to be included here. Just how many HU do you additionally need to fully heat a boiler of a given size?

Also it seems that boiler generates steam while there is no fuel, but it is still hot. Would it be more efficient to for example cool it down to 0,9 of max heat and feed it with one bucket of fuel then keep it stocked with fuel the whole time?

 

[Hydra]

Heatup is actually time based, not "heat unit" based. Heat units only decides how long a single unit of fuel lasts. For example: a 36 HP boiler 'uses' 15.84 heatunits per tick and charcoal gives 1600 hu. 1600 / 15.84 = 101 ticks (5.05 seconds). If during a tick a boiler can't burn fuel it will lower the temperature instead of raise it.

The time depends on boiler type (LP / HP) and size. What basically happens is that every tick the boiler generates 'heat ticks', and those get divided between the amount of tank blocks you have. So basically a 36 size boiler will take 36 times as long as a size 1 one.

This gets complicated a bit further because the hotter it gets the slower it heats up. However, unlike the fuel consumption which is linear with the heat this speed goes down every time the boiler goed through a 25% boundary.

In the case of a 36 HP boiler, from 20 to 250 it gives 4 heat ticks per game tick, from 250 to 500 it gives 3, from 500 to 750 it gives 2 heat ticks and from 750 to 1000 it's 1 tick per game tick.

A 36 size boiler, because it has 36 blocks, needs 36 of these heat ticks to heat up 0.05 degrees. So between 20 and 250 degrees, it takes 36/4 = 9 game ticks to raise 0.05 degrees, or (1/0.05 * 9 / 20) = 9 seconds to raise one degree (the boiler heats up in one twentieths of a degree, no coincidence). But from 750 to 1000 this goes up to 9 * 4 = 36 seconds because instead of 4 heat ticks you only get 1.

I made a spreadsheet to calculate this and this basically adds up to a 36 HP boiler taking 5:09:30 to heat to 1000 degrees. A 1 HP boiler only takes about 8 minutes.[DOUBLEPOST=1362488176][/DOUBLEPOST]This is by the way why I like boilers so much. Beginners can use them without understanding too much about them but you can actually really dive into how they work internally and understand why it takes a certain amount of time or fuel at any moment. Easy to learn, hard to master

 

[Zjarek_S]

Well, I think I'd just have to calculate it myself. I was hoping for accurate external info, just how much exactly fuel is needed to heatup boiler, ignoring fuel that would be used to produce the same amount of steam when it will be fully heated i.e. additional hidden cost of boiler. Another interesting info would be how much steam will you get from one bucket of some fuel pumped at a given temperature (for example 970 C, close to max heat) before it will cool down back to this temperature.

 

[Omicron]

Zjarek, you could technically modify the LUA script to answer that last question for you, though I'm not sure if you care for programming...

As for getting "accurate external info", I'm not sure what you mean, but the script is based on code published by CovertJaguar himself. It does heat calculation more or less exactly as Railcraft does it internally... you can't hope for much better info, really. Also, the excel sheet includes a quick reference table with heatup times and costs for all boilers, plus some other metrics.

If that's not what you're looking for, can you try to describe an example scenario around what you mean?

 

[Hydra]

Well, I think I'd just have to calculate it myself.

No need. Someone made a boiler sim: http://ttower.dyndns.org/boilerCalculator/

If you set it to heatup-only you can see how much fuel the heatup phase uses. That's the only part of the fuel consumption that's not easy to calculate on a simple piece of paper.

 

[Zjarek_S]

As for getting "accurate external info"

I meant like (using Hydra's link): you need 172 additional buckets of fuel for 36 hp boiler, because in total you need 232,3 buckets of fuel to heatup and in the same time of steam production (4 hrs, 59 mins steam production) you would use 60 buckets of fuel. So looking at it from the outside the mechanics of the boiler, this can be seen as crafting cost of fully heated boiler.

Also, fuel used near max temp is almost exactly like fuel used to keep it at this temperature. Boiler cooling down is slow, so if you could insert fuel at exact temperature that it will raise to max temperature (992 for fuel in 36hp) and then let it cool down to 992, it could give you more steam then keeping the boiler stocked with it.

I'm thinking about it while writing, but boiler seem to produce steam while cooling down. Cool down takes the same time as heating up according to this script, so you should be able to run 36 hp boiler by inserting one bucket of fuel every 9 minutes if it is already at max temp using this oscilation 992 -> 1000 -> 992, which would increase fuel efficiency by 180 %.

 

[noskk]

You could also do the same with steam. A bit easier to setup because the engines are more "fire and forget" than other engines. Especially combustion engines are more "fire and forget they go boom"

Nope, aqueous accumulator is there to let you put and forget the combustion engine. But of course you won't do it if you have limited energy, you will turn it off sometimes..

 

[Hydra]

NOpe, aqueous accumulator is there to forget you about the combustion engine.

I thought I made it quite clear that I was joking with that smiley. I never had combustion engines blow up because I never places a water source across a chunk boundary. Stuff like that is quite easy to miss and that's how combustion engines got their reputation. That was what I was referring to.

 

[noskk]

I thought I made it quite clear that I was joking with that smiley. I never had combustion engines blow up because I never places a water source across a chunk boundary. Stuff like that is quite easy to miss and that's how combustion engines got their reputation. That was what I was referring to.

Yep, TE really makes it easy to set them up.. hence aqueous accumulator is one of the Op item in TE (second to tesseract), even with 2500% hydration my oak forestry farm still running fine with only 1 aqueous accumulator .

 

[Hydra]

They're more "expensive" than a pump and less prone to cause lag (no block updates) so I think they're a great and balanced addition.

 

[Zjarek_S]

Ok, I tested this heatup cooldown boilers and they cool down quicker then I suspected (but logical, hot boiler cools down quickly). However I setup a simple 1 HP solid boiler. To keep it all time at 1000 heat you should feed one sapling every 100/(6,32/8) = 126 ticks, but I managed to keep it stable working when feeding it one sapling every 148 ticks, which is about 10 % increase in efficiency. Unfortunately large scale test would take too much time.

Edit 1 sapling every 152 ticks seem to be also stable, at 156 boiler will cool down. It is increase of 120 % to normal 126. This could be the selling point for HP boiler, because with longer heating and cooling down you will use less fuel during heating part of this cycle.

 

[Omicron]

I meant like (using Hydra's link): you need 172 additional buckets of fuel for 36 hp boiler, because in total you need 232,3 buckets of fuel to heatup and in the same time of steam production (4 hrs, 59 mins steam production) you would use 60 buckets of fuel. So looking at it from the outside the mechanics of the boiler, this can be seen as crafting cost of fully heated boiler.

*snip*

I'm thinking about it while writing, but boiler seem to produce steam while cooling down. Cool down takes the same time as heating up according to this script, so you should be able to run 36 hp boiler by inserting one bucket of fuel every 9 minutes if it is already at max temp using this oscilation 992 -> 1000 -> 992, which would increase fuel efficiency by 180 %.

Ah, I see now what you mean with 'additional' fuel. That's a good way of looking at it.

And for the second part, as you've already found out, cooldown isn't quite as slow as you'd hope it to be - in fact, cooldown is simply the inverse of the heatup process. Heatup starts fast and then slows down, going upward; cooldown starts fast and then slows down, going downward. In the final phase (above 375/750 degrees), it will cool down by four degrees in the same time it needs to heat up by one. That kind of throws a wrench into any plans to improve fuel efficiency by staggering out the feeding of fuel.

That said, nice work getting those 10%.

 

[Maldroth]

I guess that makes sense. I haven't though of a situation like that, and I still believe that not many actually exist. I mean I could still try to calculate how much thermal generators you could have made using that "pocket change" of resources you spent on getting less then 100 EU/t (more than 4... ), but I don't want to be THAT person... you know the annoying one, who wants to do everything as efficiently as possible.



Combustion engines can be set to "fire and forget" relatively easy. I believe 1 Aqueous Accumulator can support 4 Combustion Engines. If you have more than that, then you need more AA, and you also need to be careful how you place your liquiducts to avoid making a bottleneck somewhere. Yeah, they have an annoying cooldown period when you turn them off, but it's still a lot better than turning off steam.

Combustion engines are really great to use you just need to understand how the Aqueous Accumulator can output it's water, once you master that hooking up Combustion engines are easy.

The AA needs water source blocks on two sides to create water the fastest. The front of the machine counts as a side but you can't hook up pipes to it. That leaves 4 sides left to hook up water piping. If you use Buildcraft Gold Waterproof pipes each side the AA will output enough water to keep a Combustion engine cool. Note that the AA puts pressure to the water so you don't need to pump it out of the block.

Liquiducts have more volume and throughput so you only need to hook up liquiducts to two sides of the AA and that is enough to keep four engines cooled. Remember that the AA puts out water pressure so you don't need a restone signal for liquiducts to output the water.

When I setup Combustion engines I setup everything and baby sit them to max temp and then make sure their water stays topped off and then I don't have to worry about them.

 

[Zjarek_S]

As cooling down is 4 times faster then heating up, then you can get up to almost 25 % increase in fuel efficiency when staggering fuel. I'm testing how will 36HP liquid boiler cope with 1 bucket of biofuel every 124 seconds, equal to 24 % increase, now waiting for the 16 buckets already in it to empty. I don't know exactly why, because I have barrel full of biofuel capsules and I started making huge biofuel plant, but every steam count .

 

[GearSB]

Well, for some reason my desktop minecraft is freezing every 2 minutes on me, so I can't accurately test it at home.

But from what I saw on my laptop install, Two LP's are better than one HP for about a day or two before they even out enough for the efficiency differences to be trivial.

Basically, with easy infinite fuel, HP boilers should be your main steam producers, but an LP or two could be built for times when you want to run some mass fabs for a day or so at a time, or some other infrequent high energy task, where you only need extra energy for a day or two at a time.

And as for tree cutting, auto cutting is somewhat OP, but not anywhere nearly as much as the tree grow speeds are.

On a server way back, I had built an awesome manual birch tree farm, it was lit up with pathways and stuff, and with stone axes, I could harvest nearly an entire inventory of wood about as fast as the automatic options.

 

[Larroke]

Is this like the final word on global warming? seems to go on and on for being final!