fermenter findings/experiments

mementh · Apr 29th 2015

I have been playing with a fermenter power setup the last few days and figured i would share some findings about the fermenter

In my experiments i have a 9x9 farm with 5 spots cleared! using a crop harvester to pick the sugarcane!

1 macerator and 1 fluid/solid canning machine with a infinite water pump setup

1. the common thought.. using electric heat wont work/generate enough energy is 100% wrong... after a certain level! I had 4 electric heaters running on 4 fermenters and was making more then enough EU/t to power them and the supplies with about a 200 eu/t excess

honeslty its not SMART .. yes you get more biofule but the cost to run is alot higher ! so its good for the first setup/get the ball rolling.

2. I set out to see how much this grid/setup could produce at max production (using fluid heat generators) .. and found out about 1.2k eu/t with enough fermenters ( had about 40ish running and that was darm close to the canning machines limit ( maybe another 5-10 would have maxed it out but i was getting unweildy and was not powering all the generators

3. i wanted to figure out how/what the scales/ratio of fermenters to generators when using the fluid heat generators

facts/numbers

both the fluid heat generator and the semifluid generator use about 10 biogass per tick/second

the fermenter takes 6 seconds a the fluid heat generator's heat level to have a full run.
so you need 60 gas per run or 600 per minute, this is easy to generate since each run gets you 200 biogas

thats 140 leftover to run.. about 2.33ish generators ( comes out to be 20.2 biogas per tick profit)

1 fermenter can power 2 generators with 2mb/tick left over
5 can power 11 generators which is 176 eu per tick.

there is some slight overhead with the macerator/canner/crop machines but its very low and honestly the best profit for eu/t

next thing i will do now that i know the ratio is finish up on # 2.. figuring out how much it can do

SpwnX · Apr 29th 2015

The electric heat generator thing is pure math.

You use 40000 heat to produce 1000 mB of biofuel which produces 64000 heat.

With Stirling you get 64000 heat to 32000 EU. With electric heat gen you get 32000 heat from 32000 EU which is smaller than the 40000 heat required to produce a bucket of biofuel back.

You can of course use electricity to ferment, but that is only useful if you're not using to generate power to your base directly. Remote power and jetpacks for example.

Aroma1997 · Apr 29th 2015

Quote from SpwnX

You can of course use electricity to ferment, but that is only useful if you're not using to generate power to your base directly. Remote power and jetpacks for example.

It would also be useful to store energy. Assuming biogas is easier to store than energy.

SpwnX · Apr 29th 2015

With a 20% total energy loss, sure.

Chocohead · Apr 29th 2015

Makes electrolysis seem good

mementh · Apr 29th 2015

its viable just not efficient .. i figured if someone asked again we could point here

gonna work on it after raid and see how much a single farm can output..

and i am trying to think on how to have excess sugar be routed to a recycler to be scrapped but only excess not the main.. i have a idea but it would take time

also fluids in game behave weird... when i have a long line of machines to use fluid it will sometimes get the first machine full and thent he last.. the logic is weird to me

Chocohead · Apr 29th 2015

Quote from mementh

also fluids in game behave weird... when i have a long line of machines to use fluid it will sometimes get the first machine full and thent he last.. the logic is weird to me

What pipes are you using? Both GT and BC have fluid slushing if they can't find a tank by the time they reach the end of the pipe.

Aroma1997 · Apr 29th 2015

Quote from SpwnX

With a 20% total energy loss, sure.

In real-life you have higher energy loss when storing energy in that thing where they pump up water, and it's still done.

Chocohead · Apr 29th 2015

Quote from Aroma1997

in that thing where they pump up water

Pumped storage, using cheap power at night to pump water back into hydroelectric dams. The fact I have a physics exam which could ask about it in a month is totally coincidental

mementh · Apr 30th 2015

Quote from Chocohead

What pipes are you using? Both GT and BC have fluid slushing if they can't find a tank by the time they reach the end of the pipe.

neither, the fluid distributor ! its the "pipe" of IC2 which we need a propper one!!! ( or to have the recipie for this lowered ALOT!!!) http://wiki.industrial-craft.n…p?title=Fluid_Distributor

Quote from Aroma1997

In real-life you have higher energy loss when storing energy in that thing where they pump up water, and it's still done.

Quote from Chocohead

Pumped storage, using cheap power at night to pump water back into hydroelectric dams. The fact I have a physics exam which could ask about it in a month is totally coincidental

its the other way though.. pump at night release at day and its a "loss" only in the fact of the ammount of energy used is wasted however it stores more since the furnaces kept runing 24/7 loose effeciancy if they shut down at all ( takes forever to get hot again) so they are using power that would have just been wasted to store the water and
make use of it when its needed later on!

mementh · Apr 30th 2015

got what i figure is the max

2.207k eu/t for one macerator and canning machine!

so that 61 fermenters

217 semifluid generators and 2 mb/s extra

I might be off by one fermenter and 22 mb/t of gas but its dam close and thats alot that it can do from a small place!

halflife990 · Jul 29th 2015

Is this information still accurate? I'm trying to run a biogass setup and I can't seem to push past a 2-fermenters/1-semifluid generator ratio

mementh · Jul 29th 2015

should not have changed..

are you on a mod server? could the mods be limiting things?

it was like 2.1 generators could be powered by 1 fermenter ( see other posts i made)

are you constantly running it ? try seeing if it can be allowed to backup ( don't connect power ) and let everything fill and then let it run for a while.. does it flicker/ have issues?

Xaunther · Jul 29th 2015

I can confirm the fermenter - semifluid generator ratio is 5:3, using the fluid heat generator as heat source for the fermenter.

Math

Display Spoiler

halflife990 · Jul 30th 2015

Thanks for running the numbers! That's about what I was getting without knowing the math behind it. and man, biogas suddenly seems like a much less effecient way of producing energy!

irishlutheran · Jan 30th 2016

As far as efficiency goes, while it is certainly not the absolute most efficient power generator(especially when time/speed is taken into consideration), it is quite a strong mid game power source easily capable of powering all of the standard machines (macerator, washer, centrifuge, metal former etc.) simultaneously even with multiple overclock upgrades.

Note that the above will require multiple generators to accomplish.

It's not nuclear for sure, but you can still generate a lot of power with biogas and here's why:

1 run of the fermenter consumes 10mB biomass and produces 200mB biogas at the cost of 125 biogas to generate the necessary heat.

This works out to:
1 Run: consumes 10mB biomass, produces 75mB biogas
Which means that every bucket(1000mB) of biomass will produce 7500mB of biogas
Each mb of biogas produces 32 eu
1 bucket biomass = 7500 mB biogas = 240,000 eu
It takes 8 sugar cane(reeds) to produce one bucket of biomass
Converted to biomass/biogas 1 sugar cane(reed) produces 30,000 eu compared to 4,000 eu produced by coal/charcoal. An entire stack of sugar cane will produce 1.9 million eu, not quite nuclear levels but still not bad.

Fermenters do take time to convert biomass into biogas, but they can produce a lot of energy for what you put into them. I usually run my entire base off of this and use nuclear only for mass fab.

mindhack · Aug 11th 2016

Could you post a screenshot of how you set up your heat generators and fermenters? And how many fluid heat generators do you use per fermenter?

Chocohead · Aug 11th 2016

Quote from mindhack

And how many fluid heat generators do you use per fermenter?

You can only power a fermenter with a single heat generator at once, so one. And I presume that the actual arrangement is just a line of fluid geator generators touching fermenters.

Share