Mark IV EB -- 120EU/t :: Continuous 4 Reactors Swap

    [Waiting for IC2 for 1.0 before I revise this post]


    Hello all,


    I have been designing a reactor cluster that required little interaction.
    It is a cluster of 4 full reactors, no water involved. [Components]


    Run time per reactor: 1900 sec == 31.6 min
    Cool time per reactor: 7600 sec == 126.6 min


    It is all controlled by RedPower. I designed it so that it auto rotates between the 4 reactors.
    This way, there is constantly power, & more can be drawn from the cells without any interaction. [except for replacing uranium cells of course]


    [Circuit] <-- click on the weird looking images; they are stitched together. Also click the bookmarks to the right.



    If your wondering how to determine the minimum number of reactors for continuous power:
    Take the cool down time & add 1 run. A mistake I made is that its not cooling down during a run, so you need to add the run to the cool down time.
    7600+1900 = 9500
    Divide that by the run time of 1 reactor.
    9500/1900 = 5
    This should be the minimum number of reactors needed to prevent chaos & havok.



    Anyone have suggestions for better circuits or non-interactive [no water buckets] component setup?

    Your math is off. If each reactor has a cooldown time of 120 minutes, you need FIVE reactors, not 4. Otherwise, the first reactor will still need 30 minutes to cooldown when the 4th is done.

    whoops, apparently my timer said 1900s, not 1800s. Edited the fix & included an extra sig fig.
    It ran fine in practice [2 rotations], so I assumed the number I thought I read was right.


    Thanks.

    You're still not doing it right. It runs for 1900 seconds, then cools down for 7600 seconds, so the total time for run+cooldown is (1900+7600)= 9500 seconds.


    9500/1900 = 5 reactors. The cooldown time is in addition to the runtime!


    Roughly speasking, each reactor runs for half an hour, then cools down for 2 hours. So, in 2 1/2 hours, each reactor can run only once. There are five half-hours in that span of time.


    I hope I've made myself clearer - and perhaps spared you a catastrophic meltdown along the way.

    O Now I c. That explains this hole in the test site as I was revisiting this forum. LOL


    My brain is dead for the day. Gotta sleep before I make any more mistakes.

    For me external water-cooling or not has boiled (pun intended) down to: if I require stability I can't rely on it. If I'm OK with over-cooling I can provision a safety factor and live with occasional evaporation.

    Since I learned about the cascade water cooling system, I have no worries about evaporation any more. Basically, place the water source blocks 3 spaces up from the core (so they are just outside the 5x5x5 cube in which evaporation can occur). The falling water continues to cool the entire containment vessel, and since the source blocks are never evaporated they constantly replenish it.

    Quote from HeadHunter67

    Since I learned about the cascade water cooling system, I have no worries about evaporation any more. Basically, place the water source blocks 3 spaces up from the core (so they are just outside the 5x5x5 cube in which evaporation can occur). The falling water continues to cool the entire containment vessel, and since the source blocks are never evaporated they constantly replenish it.

    As an additional safety factor, I've been using blocks above the reactor to get the water to fall in a ring, so I don't have to rely so much on water physics. I had a few problems with it not flowing into all of the spaces sometimes (esp. if using pistons to control the amount of water around the reactor).

    lol I just never used ext. water since it didnt look nice. Ext. water would definitely work better, but I am trying to see if it is possible to get a buncha power on air.

    funny pictures in that link XD

    Now that's more like it! (I had wondered what dinosaur costumes had to do with it)...


    Your design would indeed allow for 4 reactors to be run more or less constantly in sequence, providing you have the means to set the timer. The cooldown is just 12 seconds longer than the full sequence would allow, so for full safety and constant operation you might want to have a 4-second off time when switching from one reactor to the next. I'm not sure of how much excess heat it would build up over the course of a full cycle otherwise - it may or may not matter.

    http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=101l101001101521s1r11r10


    This one is what I'd do if building this (which I wouldn't as I'd use a CASUC/CARUC design); it's 'only' 100eU/t but uses 1 less chamber per reactor and even had space for a small safety margin.



    PS: The reason for the odd cooldown time on the other one is that it does not assume 'gated' operation but the maximum portion of a stable cycle. If run properly it will cool.

    Unfortuantly i dont have screenies or able to get one as title says
    i literally FILLED the entire reactor with Uranium Cells
    and neatly stashed 3 Nukes underneath it
    My Entire Epicly spawned Continent was eradicated
    Biggest hole youl ever see
    but i had to close it before the mass lag became too severe :(
    :Nuke TNT: Rawr :Nuke TNT:


    Pretty sure anyone who's designed a CASUC reactor from scratch has done this.

    Guilty. My open-desert CARUC reactor got out of line in breeder mode at least once before I realized the pressure plate was a bad input for 'heat up' and I think one other time when the filters by it grabbed the first few buckets (gee I now know you can use panels to partition tubes x.x).


    That crater was... spectacular, lag inducing, hell. I think I probably took out about 30 layers of normal stone with it.

    Yeah, I recall seeing a picture of the effects. The funniest thing wasn't the crater, it was the comments from people who believe that there's no way you could possibly have 54 uranium cells without using TMI.
    I was like "wut WHAAAAAT"? I've accumulated twice that (not counting the ones I've already used for fuel), mostly from using the automated miner. I've found that there are, on average, about 3 uranium ore per chunk - but because they can spawn at just about any level, people who typically mine deep may miss many of them.