Steam Generator

I did some quick testing of the steam boiler today with 545. My test setup is basically Liquid Heat Exchanger -> Steam Boiler -> Steam Turbine -> Kinetic Generator.

Prior to today I was getting about 60EU/t from 200HU/t and occasional steam explosions as the turbine just couldn't keep up. Meanwhile a stirling generator would happily provide 200EU/t without issues, for a lot less cost.

Today, I'm very happy to see that I get 320EU/t (per 100HU/t) and no more steam explosions. The stirling generator now provides 50EU/t from 100HU/t, which is inefficient and I'm okay with that because it is so cheap.

I'm glad that steam is a much more efficient way to generate EU, but it's not perfect yet.

The power output comes in pulses because the turbine consumes steam faster than the boiler can make it, which leads to a brief "dead time" between operations. It would be really neat if the turbine had a speed-up and slow-down, consuming more steam per tick as it speeds up. That way it would become eventually become balanced with the steam input rate.

Much worse, the system can be exploited. Heating a boiler with an Electric Heat Generator creates more EU than it uses. A positive feedback loop, free energy, of roughly 200EU/t. Well, not actually free because the turbine will wear out.

I noticed the heat capacities and heat of vaporization haven't changed, so I'm guessing the balancing is far from done. I just wanted to let Thunderdark know that he should make sure EU generation is never more efficient than 1EU per 1HU, or whatever the Electric Heat Generator's ratio is.

First look at the build 549 steam generator... wow! Looks pretty awesome. I can't seem to get it to work well without constant steam "explosions", but I'll keep testing.

After reading a bit and playing around with the new Steam Generator i can only repeat kaldskryke: Awesome work!!

With the pressure valve one can set the target temperature (T>374°C gives superheated steam) which equals a valve of 220 bar. This works at 1mb/t input and 200h/t. Increasing the temperature further doesn't change anything yet i think.

I tried testing this with a kin. steam generator and i got explosions all the time, so i guess there is some WIP going on with them.

When i added a 3rd liquid heat exchanger the GUI of all 3 heat exchangers stated 100/100 heat transfer but the Steam generator only stated it needed 200h/t. After checking the liquid tanks of the heat exchangers, i found out, only 2 consumed coolant, the 3rd just stated 100/100 but didn't use any coolant. Seems like a updating a variable is missing there.

Sometimes i managed to have steam in the inputtank and this completely screwed the thing up. i wasn't able to pull the steam out of the input tank and the thing wasn't doing anything so i have no idea. I i think it happened when the water in the inputtank went empty and somehow the steam generator filled its own tank with steam.

Since the Steam Generator is able to produce superheated steam, i guess there will be no Steam superheater, right?

The reason you're getting steam in the output tank is a typo in line 113. It's supposed to make sure that any "leftover" steam that can't find a place to go will explode. Any leftover water gets returned to the tank. It's checking for types "3" and "4", which would correspond to steam and superheated steam, but the enumeration in getoutputtyp goes from 0-3 rather than 1-4. So if you have any leftover steam (actually type 2), it will get put into the tank :S.

I'm not sure why you're only getting 200h/t into your boiler, the cap in the code is 1200. Perhaps one of your heat exchangers is pointed the wrong way?

The pressure valve setting is interesting. If you have your valves tuned precisely, you'll get a steady flow of steam at maximum efficiency. If you're even slightly off, you'll end up getting steam in batches at a cost of 200hu/mB. That's because if the heat input isn't exactly what the code expects, the steam generation will go to a "default" mode where each mb of water will drop the boiler temperature by 0.1 degrees. Since the heat capacity of the whole system is now fixed at 2000, that means it costs 200hu/mB in this default mode.

You're right that a pressure valve setting of 220 will give you superheated steam, requiring precisely 200hu per mb of water. Easy peasy. Just set the water flowrate to 1mB per liquid heat exchanger that you have connected.

A pressure valve setting of 1 will give normal steam, requiring exactly 100.4545454545...hu/mB input for a smooth flow of steam, which is theoretically the cheapest you can produce steam. However, getting exactly 100.45454545... heat is effectively impossible. A setting of 22, however, will require 110hu/mB which is actually possible.

Setting the pressure valve above 220 seems a bit silly, as it increases the cost of superheated steam for no reason, and only works nicely at settings of and 242, 264, 286. Anything else will get you regular steam again.

The good news is that superheated steam normally costs less than twice as much as regular steam, which means it's actually worth making. The bad news is that the precision needed with the pressure valve makes the system very awkward. A little bit of rounding would be nice.

EDIT: time to start looking at the steam turbines. Just from peeking at the code: Awesome! Adaptive speed! Using superheated steam will output regular steam! Using regular steam will output... 90% of the original steam. So, multistage turbines are now useful!

Quote from Thunderdark

not its a overpressure valve 1 = 1Bar over standard...if set to 0 you need 100Hu/mB the cheapest you can produce steam.

Oh, good

I can't get this to output the 320eu/t kaldskryke said he was getting. I have a steam generator outputting superheated steam at 100mb/t and the steam turbine hooked up to it only produces 400kU, which only produces 100eu/t. Am I doing something wrong or was it nerfed? 100eu/t isn't really worth it since 2 sterling generators can produce that for less. I'm using build 589 by the way.

Hmm, I tried sticking a 3rd heat exchanger on the steam generator, but it still only consumed 200HU/t. So then I upped the pressure valve to the max, 300 bar. That increased it to 236HU/t, but had absolutely no effect on the kinetic steam generator. It still said 400kU.

Just now I had a thought to try adding a 2nd steam generator. That raised the kinetic steam generator to 800kU, which now produces 200EU/t. Is it supposed to require multiple steam generators to maximize the kU?

Ok, I think I understand it a bit better now. At 1 bar and 4mB/t, it consumes 400Hu/t and produces 800kU. Or you could use 221 bar and consume only 2mB/t for the same output. Either way produces 200EU/t using one steam generator and 4 liquid heat exchangers. I'm still not getting the 150EU/t per 100mB/t of steam though.

Also, is 400Hu/t the max? Since you need 1 side touching the kinetic steam generator and another side for the water input, there's only 4 sides for heat input. Heat exchangers and electric heat generators cap out at 100Hu/t.

Ah I didn't know you needed to chain them together like that. That got me to almost 300EU/t but for some reason a small amount of distilled water keeps accumulating in the turbine, lowering its efficiency. I have fluid ejectors installed and the condenser has 4 heat vents.

When a turbine is running on "regular" steam, 10% of that steam will condense on the blades of the turbine, and the remaining 90% will go to the condenser. Superheated steam, by definition, is well above its boiling point and does not condense.Even so, it's a good idea to run water pipes from both turbines and the condenser back to the boiler, just in case. You really don't want to run out of water in the boiler, as it will explode at 500°C.

If you are getting condensation on your "first-stage" turbine, it means your boiler is occasionally outputting regular steam instead of superheated steam. I've had this happen occaisionally, but I'm not entirely sure why.

I've also had a few times where the boiler gets "stuck" producing regular steam, even though the settings are correct for superheated steam. I'm not sure what's going on here, but I have a theory:

There are a couple of conditions required to produce superheated steam, in this order:
0) The pressure valve setting is used to determine a "target temperature", rounded to whole degrees.
1) The boiler temperature, rounded to the nearest 0.1 degree has to be at the target temperature
---a) if it's too hot, it will produce steam as it cools down 0.1C at a time
---b) if it's too cold, it will heat up by 0.0005 for each HU. At 200HU/t this is also 0.1C. At 100HU/t, the increase is 0.05C
2) The boiler has to be receiving enough heat to make the steam
--- if it does not receive enough heat, its temperature will increase instead. Again, 0.0005 for each HU
3) If the temperature is >= 374.0, it makes superheated steam, temperature remains constant
--- otherwise it makes regular steam, temperature remains constant

Let's say I'm running a 1mB/t, 220bar, 200HU/t, and for whatever reason, one of my Liquid Heat Exchangers (LHE) stops emitting heat for 1 or 2 ticks (but not 3). On the first tick, the temperature rises by 0.05C to 374.05 because of condition 2. On the second tick, condition 1 uses a rounded (up) value of 374.1, and therefore 1a happens, cooling the actual temperature to 373.95. Regular steam is emitted here due to the cooldown. On the third tick, condition 1 will now round up to 374.0 and pass. If the LHE is now working again, condition 2 passes as well. However, condition 3 does not pass because the actual temperature 373.95 is still less than 374.0, and regular steam is created. This continues to occur indefinitely until, for whatever reason, 0.05C is added or removed from the boiler.

so why don't BC fluid pipes work for transporting steam from a boiler without steam explosions, but the IC2 fluid distributor works perfectly? also, why is the condensator required at the turbine end?

I'm using four 100 hU/t electric heat generators (EHGs) attached to the steam generator here.

For some reason, when I turn up the mb/t throughput at the bottom, the EHGs stop generating hU/t even though they are being powered by debug tools each.

Is this intended or a bug? Using build #590 here.
If it is intended, how can I work around it?

EDIT: So by reading around it seems that it is intended... right?

So need help here:

- Are the steam "explosions" completely normal?
- Is there any benefit to having a higher temperature and hence pressure?
- How are the Kinetic Steam Generator and Kinetic Generator aligned?