Combustion Engine Cooling

[speed150mph]

Hey guys.

Im building a massive Refinery Complex using 26 combutsion engines for pumps pipes, power, ect.. The setup I currently have is two pumps each powered by 4 blulectric engines feeding water from reseviour to 9 water tanks (3 blocks high). Wooden pipe powered by 2 blulectric engines feed water into a manifold, to one pipe that routes up and feeds water to the combution engines on three floors. Note that I will prime the cooling system first, filling all the engines with water before running.

My engines will be burning oil, and I want to be able to run them for extended periods of time without shutting them down if possible.

After reading more on it, Its obvious that this set-up will most likely not be enough, due to the small number of pumps, tanks, and the distrebution problems of running a single water pipe to keep up with the water demands of the engines. What would be the best set up, using as litle space and resources as possible, to keep my engines in the green.

Another couple questions. Is there anything I can use to monitor the temperature of my engines. I know I can use a BC sensor card in the computer, but with this many engines, this doesnt really work out very well. Also how much water does a combution engine use as compared to oil? How long does it usually take for it to turn green.

I know this is a large post, with alot of complex questions. Thanks for taking the time to answer :)

[plowmanplow]

As far as sensing the temperature state of the pump, BC gates are your friend.

[speed150mph]

Okay I read up on them, and I could see how I could use them as an emergancy shutdown if the engines overheat, however I was hoping for something that could give me a real time operating temperature. Like how you can use a remote sensor card and industrial information panel to monitor reactor temps. :p

[plowmanplow]

Yes indeed. ComputerCraft with openCCSensors, a sensor peripheral, a BC sensor will allow you to pull all sorts of information from engines including, but not limited to: heat, power state, stored energy, etc.

[speed150mph]

I figured that out. but cc sensors are a pain in the back end if i have to scroll through the list and refresh everytime to notice temperature increase. Is there a way I can put the engine outputs and temperatures all onto a monitor in a way that it refreshes automatically?

also what about my water pump set-ups. what do I need to do to that? :P

[plowmanplow]

If you don't care about style or portability you could have a program that does what you need for about 10 lines of code

[speed150mph]

Okay, as an update, i figured out a better setup that should work. Im using 3 pumps powered by a combustion engine each. each pump will handle a floor, which each have about 9 engines. to solve my distribution problems, im going to have a water storage tank for each engine. the waterpump fills each tank, and its taken from the tank to the engine. Now heres my question about this. what type of engine should I use to power the wooden pipe from the tank

[SpoonsV]

The most elegant, space-saving and simple solution to your water pump problems would be Liquid Tesseracts connected to Aqueous Accumulators.

Place the Accumulator in the centre of a 3x3x1 hole filled with water with the tesseract connected on top of it. You can have one tesseract outputting to all other tesseracts. However to be truly explosion proof you would want one tesseract on each engine feeding them water. This way you avoid the need for pipes and extra things that can go wrong.

[Jahones]

So this might be confusing so feel free to PM me if you'd like a more detailed explanation on this if at all you're confused:

If you combine your engines into a setup for a power core and set them up to a timer running one side while the other side cools, you can safely refine oil till the cows come home.

Just set up both sides (the combustion engines) to power up through the use of AND gates so you can turn either or both sides off at will.

Using around 4 Aqueous Accumulators connected to Phased Waterproof pipes (no need to power the Accumulator or the piping out of water) you can efficiently cool about 6 combustion engines per timed run.

Just set up your core far enough from any chests you have that hold anything valuable (even though it won't blow up, but you can never be too cautious)!

My setup has 24 Combustion engines split on 2 separate timed intervals running 24/7 with Lamps indicating which side is active. That core was made primarily as a charging station for my red stone energy cells but with all the excess fuel refined from it, it's now going into powering my mass fabricator sine I only have 2 MV solar arrays at the moment...

Sorry for the long post, but I hope that helps you figure out your dilemma. Feel free to pm me if you got anymore questions and what not.

[Flextt]

I am going to sound religious here, having basically posted the same 2 minutes ago:

- Use Liquiducts and your distribution problems will be gone. You will be able to effortlessly fork piping, redistribute, adapt, change and compress your design. Also, Liquid Tesseracts could work well enough, if distances are too long or excessive piping is not an option due to cost and space-demand.

- Same goes for MJ output. Use Redstone Energy Conduits to avoid excess MJ storing or looping inside conductive pipes. They may be costlier and more complicated to make, but essentially prevent explosions and allow more efficient routing. The 5% internal loss per engine is offset by a turn-on and forget feature inherent to Thermal Expansion piping / transportation. Note however, that you should calculate whether or not using an Energy Tesseract (25% energy loss per teleportation!) is worth it. If your setup means, you have to sacrifice critical amounts of material, that should mean, that you should get the most out of it, until you have refilled your storage.

- Seeing as you already noticed, you really should loop back MJ from the Combustion Engines to somehow create an independent system without excessive wiring. An even more elegant solution, as already mentioned, would be Aqueous Accumulators, since they work without MJ and could also very well fill your water demand. Pumps often are affected by draining even infinite water sources due to chunk loading, lag, etc.

[SpoonsV]

I am going to sound religious here, having basically posted the same 2 minutes ago:

- Use Liquiducts and your distribution problems will be gone. You will be able to effortlessly fork piping, redistribute, adapt, change and compress your design. Also, Liquid Tesseracts could work well enough, if distances are too long or excessive piping is not an option due to cost and space-demand.

- Same goes for MJ output. Use Redstone Energy Conduits to avoid excess MJ storing or looping inside conductive pipes. They may be costlier and more complicated to make, but essentially prevent explosions and allow more efficient routing. The 5% internal loss per engine is offset by a turn-on and forget feature inherent to Thermal Expansion piping / transportation. Note however, that you should calculate whether or not using an Energy Tesseract (25% energy loss per teleportation!) is worth it. If your setup means, you have to sacrifice critical amounts of material, that should mean, that you should get the most out of it, until you have refilled your storage.

- Seeing as you already noticed, you really should loop back MJ from the Combustion Engines to somehow create an independent system without excessive wiring. An even more elegant solution, as already mentioned, would be Aqueous Accumulators, since they work without MJ and could also very well fill your water demand. Pumps often are affected by draining even infinite water sources due to chunk loading, lag, etc.

You can go further and get rid of all the pipes and potential weak points by just installing a tesseract directly next to any machine that will accept the input (most will). In the case of energy, just use an energy bridge to convert from MJ to EU as needed. Tesseracts are cheap and fun to make so I have them everywhere.

[Flextt]

You can go further and get rid of all the pipes and potential weak points by just installing a tesseract directly next to any machine that will accept the input (most will). In the case of energy, just use an energy bridge to convert from MJ to EU as needed. Tesseracts are cheap and fun to make so I have them everywhere.

Yeah, but imho, they are not that cheap to make. They need diamonds, hardened glass and iron to make ender pearls or an End farm. Furthermore, I am unsure if they communicate between themselves and machines like they do with pipes. Considering 20-something Combustion Engines are not that much and considering, he would likely build more if he could or wanted, dropping numerous Tesseracts seems excessive, especially energy ones due to the loss.

[SpoonsV]

Well, once you have run a couple quarries you are pretty much there. An Ender Pearl can be created by combining a Minium Stone and 4 iron ingots. Simples and well worth the investment. Especially considering how easy they are to move and redeploy.

But yeah, one on every machine is a bit much. Use one at either end of a line of energy conduits, one recieving and feeding into the conduits which feed into another tesseract which is set to send. You can pipe into the line of conduits no problem.