Best yellowrite 5*5 reactor

[jakalth]

Mystcraft in tekkit.  A good way to find places to set up a quarry or gather lava without destroying the land around your base.  Also another way to find(well make would be more accurate) abundent resources that would otherwise be scarse.

[Thrombo]

Interesting. I have yet to try turbines, as the plain reactor already produces much more than I can waste, but they sure look nice.

 

I duplicated my reactor, with the only difference being the five fuel columns being arranged in a plus shape instead of an X. The power curve is similar, but efficiency is a little higher from Rod90% to Rod40%. After that, i.e. at higher power levels, if falls below the X reactor a little, but not dramatically so.

Overall, the Plus Reactor is more efficient. At 80-60%, it actually burns a single yellorium ingot for over 100 million (!) RF. That is two Resonant Energy Cells, filled with just one ingot. It will output ~10000 RF/t around its optimal state at 60% and ~850°C. So I guess that is indeed the best 5x5 setup the topic asked for.

 

To clarify, what I call a Plus Reactor is this arrangement:

GGGGG

GGFGG

GFFFG

GGFGG

GGGGG

 

 

G = Gelid Cryotheum

F = Fuel Column

 

The reactor frame is 7x7x10, for a 5x5x8 interior.

I guess packing columns tightly has no downsides as long as your coolant is potent, and you will profit from the added heat and irradiation. So until somebody comes up with a vastly better idea, I will stay with this one.

 

Assuming I'm not using the Extra Utilties fluid extractors and am using BC pumps instead, anybody have any idea how many pumps/coolant ports this configuration would require and how much steam is output?

[jakalth]

They were running their reactor as a passively cooled reactor, no steam production.  But, if it runs anything like mine(same configuration, but less coolent so 5x5 instead of 7x7), it will require between 14 and 24 coolent ports with max water input via fluiducts(120mb/tick each).  Enough pumps too move 2,500mb/tick minimum of water.  I was using 70 aqueous accumulators too accomplish this before switching too the transfer node.  yeah...  70 of them...

 

the steam output could fluctuate between 1,600 and 2,800mb per tick of steam depending on how hot you run the reactor and wether or not you can keep enough water pumping into the reactor.  The water tank in the reactor controller should not drop below 1/4 while the reactor is running.  if it does, you need more water inputs.

 

1 coolent port, with a tesseract connected directly too it, can output the full amount of steam the reactor can produce.  but using it all will require more then one turbine/steam consumer and a tesseract to transfer steam out too each one.  neither fluiducts or fluid pipes can move sufficient amounts of steam alone to keep up with that much production.  Fluiducts can only move 360mb/tick of steam, while fluid pipes can only move 40mb/tick max.  correct me if the fluid pipes have been changed please.  Tesseract can move over 4,000mb/tick.

Edited March 26, 2014 by jakalth

[HeatHunter]

you can also use the transfer nodes to transport the steam out of your reactor... (could save you some tesseracts )

 

have been running good tests with

 

RRRRR

RFFFR

RFFFR

RFFFR

RRRRR

 

(7*7*9 including case)

 

with control rods pushed in 80% I could generate 4k mb/t steam at a fuel rate of 0.082 (just had 2 turbines attached so it will actually be more steam, have to test this further with a void pipe attached)

Edited March 26, 2014 by HeatHunter

[jakalth]

How about this for a fuel efficient little reactor?  5x5x3 reactor with a 3x3x1 volume for holding the fuel cells.  has 5 reactor cells in a + pattern.  Uses resonant ender as it's coolant, and is setup to generate steam.  Using gelid cryothium has almost no improvements over resonant ender.  The steam goes into a 7x7x6 turbine with 20 blades and a single enderium coil, producing 5101 RF/tick from 439mb/tick of steam.

 

The reactor layout:  In a single layer.

 

RFR

FFF
RFR

 

the specs: (with fresh fuel inserted)

 

Temp = 612 C

Heated coolent flow = 478mb/tick

fuel use = 0.016mb/tick

radiation = 348%

control rods = 50%

 

The reactor its self can generate 1.1RF/tick when setup as a passive generator, but it's fuel usage goes up slightly too 0.018.  Also, due to it's small size, it's power and steam production drops as it starts to use up fuel.  it drops down to about 440mb/tick steam production, or 1.08RF/tick power production before it cycles out the cyanite and replaces it with a fresh bar of yellowrium.  it's fuel usage also drops as it uses up fuel though.  dropping by 0.002mb/tick of fuel as it gets close to using up a bar of fuel.

 

not sure if I'd call this the most efficient setup all together, but for a small reactor, it's pretty good.

Edited March 26, 2014 by jakalth

[joshuad156]

On effecient reactors:

That's pretty good.  I currently am using a setup that consumes .0069 mB/t to generate ~2500 RF/t in a small turbine on about 220 mB/t of steam.  It was the lowest yellorite comsumption I could come up with while generating enough steam to effeciently turn a single Enderium block coil.  I think i settled on a 7x7x3 reactor with 8 fuel rods packed in the middle (imagine a 3x3 in the center with a corner missing).  1 single 64x64 quarry yeilds me a few months worth of fuel at this rate.  =D

 

Uses for the reactors: power dem drills

I see that pumping this power into laser drills with yellow or green focii will produce more fuel ores than the reactor consumes.  This should yield a self-sustaining ore generating setup that is infinitely expandable.  Can't wait to put this in action.  I built a 11x11x15 enderium turbine in creative that generated some 25,000+ RF/t (maybe it was 30,000  I can't remember now).  wow that was awesome.

 

On resonent ender vs gelid cryothium

I have seen very marginal performance gains with cryo.  Enders are just so darn easy to get, and since your ender flows so easily this is WAY easier to use to fill large/tall reactors with ease.  This is a no brainer to me.  The mod author should probably either nerf Res Ender or buff Cryo a bit more.  There just aren't enough gains for the insane drawbacks of using Cryo.

 

Lastly, on transporting large volumes steam: use tesseracts!

I toyed with using 1 large reactor producing about 3200 mB/t of steam to power 2 large Enderium block turbines each requiring around 1600 mB/t of steam.  Liquiducts seem to be COMPLETELY inadequate for use in anything but the smallest turbines.  Transfer nodes with upgrades work OK for 1 small-medium sized turbine.  However, when I tried to split the steam into 2 turbines, the transfer nodes seemed to completely bug out and wouldnt send enough steam to either turbine.  In the end I found that plopping a tesseract on the reactors steam output, and on the turbines' inputs worked brilliantly.  Other than the high cost of making a tesseract (which isnt bad when you consider what you're building anyway) this seems to be an ideal solution.

 

 

[HeatHunter]

I used one transfer node per connected turbine and this worked just fine for at least 2 turbines using 2k mb/t and were giving ~13k RF/t each

 

also the material costs for the transfer nodes are much cheaper especially in the beginning...

 

but true, later in game tesseracts may be better to carry the steam around as you can put the turbines wherever you want that way (even into another dimension and use the same tesseract to get the power out)

 

 

does anybody have run any tests on what happens when you run multiple turbine towers on the same frequency? (with tesseract)

[brilliantjoe]

does anybody have run any tests on what happens when you run multiple turbine towers on the same frequency? (with tesseract)

 

 

I do, incoming post!

 

Alright so here we go. I've been doing testing for the last few days on a good setup for running an actively cooled reactor and getting as much RF out of a single reactor as possible. I'm pretty sure I can improve on the design a bit, but for now this is pretty good. 

 

First up, my reactor design:

 

The best reactor I've found so far for running turbines is a 7x7x7 external with a 5x5x5 internal space. The following two images show the reactor setup.

 

The reactor has a pretty decent efficiency and produces a TON of steam. The problem with it is it requires a massive amount of water to produce this steam. I have 4 fluid transfer nodes sucking water into the reactor, each of which has 2 stacks of mining and 2 stacks of speed upgrades, and that wont keep the reactor full 100% of the time, but it never bottoms out either. 

With liquid ender pearls the reactor runs with a slightly lower efficiency than gelid, the following picture is of the gelid reactor efficiency. (Ignore the battery, the reactor used to be passively cooled and it wont go away.)

As you can see, the steam output is filled completely which helps to drive the temperature up and increase the efficiency of the reactor. 7200 mb/tick of steam output is enough to power 4 of my turbines at full speed. The turbines are up next.

 

So I played around with a ton of different turbine designs, and finally settled on what I believe to be the best combination of size and efficiency. The following picture shows the design that I landed on.

 

 

These turbines are 7x7x16 horizontal turbines. They have 4 full rings of enderium coils and 10 fans with 8 blades each. Each turbine can handle a max of 2000 mb/tick of steam, with 80 blades. I found in testing that this design will spin out of control if I run it at 2k mb/tick, and settles just over 1800 rpm at 1800 steam input. The next picture shows the settings/ouput of this setup.

 

 

As you can see, this setup produces just under 21k rf/tick. I am running 4 of these turbines off of the reactor that I showed earlier in the post. I like this setup, but plan on doing some more testing to see if I can get the turbine running at 1800 rpm using all 2k mb/tick of steam that the reactor can use. I *think* that I can add a few more enderium coils and up the RF output even more.

 

Hopefully this is helpful, if not totally overkill.

Edited March 26, 2014 by brilliantjoe

[jakalth]

Hmmm, brilliantjoe.  adding another coil of enderium might push the demand on your turbine blades past what they can turn.  But, if you increase your steam input by single digits at a time, you should be able to squeeze another couple hundred RF/tick out of that turbine design.  1825/1830 RPM seems to be where power production pretty much flat lines.  faster then this and you don't gain much if any additional power output.  But up to that point, you still gain decent additional power.  give that a try as well.

 

Compaired to the turbine design I've been playing around with, your design seems to be more efficient.  Nicely done.

 

My design uses 4 enderium rings, and 1 gold ring.  Has 4 fans that are each 11x11 in dimension and made from 20 turbine blade segments.  Uses all 2,000mb/tick of steam.  Has settled at 1813.7RPM and produces 21559RF/tick.  It is a 13x13x11 super wide vertical turbine.  The thing is truely massive in size, but seems to be less efficient in compairison to yours...  Mine = 10.7795RF/mb of steam.  Brilliantjoe's = 11.6233RF/mb of steam.  I'm also sure you could push your's up to 21K+ RF/tick if you tweaked the steam flow by single digits.

 

As for tesseracts and moving steam.  I've had the one reactor outputting into a tessaract, and the steam transfered too 5other turbines, each with their own tesseract, and all 6 were on the same channel.  So yes, multiple output tesseracts on a single channel work just fine HeatHunter.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Aparently brilliantjoe, if you take your design, reduce its length too 15, instead of 16, and remove 1 fan from it so it only has 72 blades instead of 80, you can actually increase its efficiency even more.  I was able to drop it's flow rate too 1746mb/tick and still get the same power output by doing that.

 

Edited March 26, 2014 by jakalth

[brilliantjoe]

I have another design that's proving to be quite good: 9x9x15. 6x12 blade rotors and one 8 blade rotor with 38 enderium blocks (4 full rings and 1 partial ring).

Check this out...

[jakalth]

hmmm, i didn't even know it would accept a partial ring.  and that's a lot of power from your turbine.  nicely done.

[brilliantjoe]

Has anyone figured out if we can use a liquid besides water to actively cool the reactors?

[Thrombo]

I just wanted to point out that you can start and run a reactor with a "friend" inside it in SMP. Further testing with a turbine is pending. Personblocks do not appear to be a valid coolant, though.

[brilliantjoe]

One of my turbines has a creeper trapped in it...

[Curunir]

In one video I saw squid swimming around in a reactor. But I think that was an old version, and also in Creative.

 

Since my world got corrupted by a driver-induced bluescreen, I am now trying to get back on my feet in a new world. Currently smelting the ingredients for my starting reactor, and I will try to get an early (small) turbine attached to it for better returns.

[jakalth]

well, I've tried liquids like resonant ender, destabolized redstone.  none of the ones I have tried work for active cooling.  have not tried liquids like milk of mooshroom stew yet...

[jakalth]

ok, have an update for you all.  I've tried every liquid in tekkit as the active coolant in a reactor powering a turbine.  No liquid, other then water, work to generate the steam or hot fluid needed to power a turbine.  In fact no liquid other then water is even accepted by the coolant port.  So looks like water is the only solution here.

[Curunir]

I just pictured you running across a cow pasture with a bucket, to get the milk for your experiment... :-D

Thanks for clearing that up. It does make some sense, given that water is the heat transfer agent also in most real-world power plants. I think the only two exceptions are the "heavy water" in nuclear reactors and the superheated oil used in some large-scale solar setups. And I am not sure if the heavy water isotopes are in fact a heat transfer agent.

 

My new starting reactor is a 5x5x5 frame with five colums in plus shape and four water columns for cooling. Easily outputs ~2200 RF/t at 70% and ~1200°C. Before I can even think of adding turbines, I need to figure out how to waste that energy. A quarry only needs a fraction of that, and I have only a few small machines besides it.

[Thrombo]

I need to figure out how to waste that energy. 

 

I find that a modest 'always on' AE setup is a good way to waste energy.

[HeatHunter]

Before I can even think of adding turbines, I need to figure out how to waste that energy.

 

I find that a modest 'always on' AE setup is a good way to waste energy.

 

I think MFR Laser's are a really good energy drain

[zeeZ]

With lasers you can waste 20k RF/t. If you want a cheaper method of wasting energy, use lava fabricators and void pipes

Turbines seem to produce most at around 1840 RPM.

For those with water/steam logistics problems: You can build reactor and turbine adjacent to each other with the coolant/fluid ports touching for instant full transfer. Best is to finish the turbine(s) first, then configure the ports from inside the reactor.

[brilliantjoe]

I'm running 5 laser drills off 2 turbines, and that's self sufficient for yellorium/uranium.

 

I'm going to run more, as I have 9 turbines running off two reactors producing about 190k rf/tick. Well'p.

Edited March 29, 2014 by brilliantjoe