Decentralized Distribution of Steam (DDoS)

Quote from Kenken244

bear in mind that even if you have enough cooling towers to hold all of the microcycles, adding more cooling towers will still increase your effective eu/t as you can run the reactor more often, up until th epoint that you can run it constantly. In my current game I am building a setupp with four single chamber, 8 quad uranium celled reactors, with 64 cooling towers. It is certainly a large build.

Quasi-true, depending on the setup.

The 'optimal' or maximum amount of cooling towers useful to you would be dividing your cooling cycle time and dividing it by your micro-cycle time. You'd probably want to round up from there.

For this setup, your micro-cycle time would be approximately 175 seconds, with a cooldown time of approximately 5k seconds (if we are being conservative and only taking into consideration the 12 cooling per cell ones on the edges rather than the 16/cell) for around 10 towers total (it calculates out to around 27-29 micro-cycles per cooling cycle, and each tower can handle three such micro-cycles).

Therefore, for four of them, you'd only need 40 at most. 64 is overcooling by over 50%. You could put another two generating reactors in there easily, possibly a third, depending on how the fractions work out with the internal cell slots.

Quote from Requia

how do you handle the split second where the cooling cell isn't in the reactor, or will that not matter as long as its less than 1 second?

Reactor turns off during cell transfer.

Quote from Kenken244

All true.however, in my case, my cooling tower design is not the one in the op, it is my own custom 2 chamber design. because I like to have a wall of reactors. With this design, the cooling towers are almost always working.

Care to share with the class? I am not seeing how it could work in a two-chamber reactor. What kind of EU/t are you getting out of it?

That's an interesting design, but there's a kind of a hitch here...

Your cooling tower only holds FOUR cells. Sure, it's cooling 60 per cell, but you'll actually need two cooling towers per micro-cycle!

By way of contrast, my cooling tower cools 12-16 per cell, but it holds SIX times as many cells, meaning one tower is good for three micro-cycles.

So let's do some math:

80 cooling per cell means a cooling cycle time of a mere 12.5 minutes for a regular 60k Cooling Cell. However, you'll need two towers per micro-cycle.

With the standard reactor setup as previously mentioned, you've got about a 3 minute micro-cycle. Which means you'll need 4*2=8 plus probably at least two more just to keep up with the fractions, since you don't want everything to blow up. In other words, you're going to end up with just as many cooling towers

Having said that, you're going to end up using fewer cells due to your higher cooling per cell, which will constitute a massive savings in tin, even though you'll be going through stacks of gold instead.

Is it possible to 'double up' your design so you can hold eight coolant cells?

Quote from skavier470

yes but again as they share the OC vents the cooling per cell wil go further down.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…l5no8v83d3kqduvbdefq7gcu8

So that one has... what, 60 cooling per cell, if I'm looking at it right?

Okay, so with a typical 60k cell, you're looking at precisely 1k seconds for a cooldown cycle. With a micro-cycle time of 175 seconds, you're looking at probably 5-6 cooling towers necessary.

Now where this gets really fun is when we start playing with GregTech components...

With Thorium cells, you're looking at needing only two cooling towers, since you are looking at about a 700 second micro-cycle time. Granted, only 192 EU/t, but you're looking at a grand total of 192 million EU out of the reactor in a full cycle.

The Plutonium reactor, however, only needs 13 of these cooling towers to be able to hit the 'continuously running' without need for cooldown between cycles. But at 1920 EU/t, this is a fair tradeoff.

The 360k cooling cells would have a 100 minute cool cycle. This means 6 cooling towers for the Uranium cells, as each cycle is just over 1,000 seconds. You'd still need 2 for the Thorium reactor, since you're looking at a 4,000 second micro-cycle and a 6,000 cooling cycle. And the Plutonium one would still need 13. So you wouldn't be saving any towers, but you would be cutting down the number of micro-cycles per total cycle.

Quote from Kenken244

My setup uses 35 cooling towers for every 4 generating reactors. I have only just begun to build the system, but I eventually hope to have 70 cooling towers and 8 generating reactors. With output set to 5 times normal, The output rivals a fusion reactor, and I get to line my walls with reactors, which is an added bonus.

That actually sounds pretty awesome!

Quote

Also, I have been thinking, would it be better to use heat vents or heat exchangers instead of coolant cells? The microcycle time would have to be much shorter, and you would need lots of extra components, but theoretically, the cooling would be higher. The resource cost for all the extra components might make this impractical, however.

Heat vents wouldn't be able to keep up with heat generation. With 8 quad-uranium cells and the reflectors, you're looking at 2688 heat per second. If you are talking about replacing the 60 cooling cells with vents, that's not going to work either. First off, the cooling cells take up all the heat given to them, the heat vents can handle... what... 35? Not practical.

Because the cooling cells take up the heat, there is no core temperature rise, so none of the usual methods of transferring heat from the core to the components won't work, because it isn't generating any.

If you are talking about something like this, you're spending over a stack of gold to be able to buy yourself twenty seconds on your micro-cycle time. Mind you, this does bring up the micro-cycle time to precisely 200 seconds, meaning you'll need exactly 5 cooling towers, so you do end up saving yourself a cooling tower, meaning it might actually be worth the cost.

Now, this does work better on a Thorium reactor, micro-cycle times jumps from almost 12 minutes to 20 minutes and change. This means that you'd only need a single cooling tower to run with it. Of course, the Thorium reactor is a mere 192 EU/t, which doesn't really make all the hassles really worth it, since you can get the same kind of energy output from a battery of 10 geothermal generators (less if you use Gregtech's Thermal Generators).

It would have almost no effect on a Plutonium reactor. It would add a whole 4 seconds to your micro-cycle time.

Or you could just flicker the reactor, in which case you have re-invented the Mk. III reactor. Would save even more on time and resources, plus have less of a chance of explody during transfer.