Need help, reactor too STRONK!

[Uprox]

Back again with another round of questions. My survival base has become immense, and I am looking to end my power concerns for good. As such, I have created a monster of a reactor, that I even looked into the 2 big google docs on reactors and turbines. I chose this design ' alt='' class='ipsImage' width="1000px" height="592px">">' alt='' class='ipsImage' width="1000px" height="592px"> aaaand then made it 10 tall with a 8x19x19 chamber, 133 fuel rods. first attempts to make it as a passive cooled unit failed when with all control rods at 90% I was still left with a core temp of over 1200. (burned too much fuel too fast for my tastes) So I decided it was time to see about getting it changed over to active cooling and siphon that heat to some spiffy new turbines.

This is where I start running into problems. I first decided to go with the 5x5x8 turbine mentioned in Scice's turbine power google doc. 2 rows of enderium coils, with 16 blades. From what I can tell from my testing in creative there is nothing wrong with my turbines. My problem comes from steam generation, transport, and attempting to make a closed system out of it somehow.

1. I was under the impression that you could send water to the reactor, get steam out, and then steam goes into turbine and comes out as water again, and this can be sent back to the reactor again. (aka: closed system) what my testing seems to show is that my system has "leaks" and wont keep generating steam unless I connect in near unlimited water.

2. steam generation, transport, and utilization. I was just reading something else stating that a reactor can make a max of 50,000mb/t of steam, and turbines can take a max of 2000mb/t steam. I can deal with that, I can make 25 turbines if I need to, but I appear limited by Fluiducts themselves. "Liquiduct transfer rate is 100mB/t per connection" after discovering this, I attempted to switch to pure tesseract fluid transport. according to the wiki the reactor and turbine ports for coolant have no flow limits, only their connections. I had a hard time getting steam and water to "flow" the right way at first but finally got it to semi work, and then I was running out of water and getting hardly any steam. I assume this to be a problem of not having enough water flowing through the system one way or another, or problems with turbine controls. Am I on the right tack here? If I'm making that much steam, is direct tesseract transfer my best option?

3. Does proper water and steam management actually cool my reactor? If i get this system all sorted out, will I expect to see temperatures back under 900?

4. instead of a closed system, would I be better off with a three stage system? where I pump water in to the reactor from a Near-unlimited water supply, steam out to the turbines, and then water from turbines back into this massive water reservoir?

Lastly I would love to hear your help and input on this, This community has pointed me in the right so far on my quest of tekkit expansions.

Edited June 28, 2014 by Uprox

[Digdug83]

Looking at that picture you could try a few things to bring it down as a passively cooled reactor if that was your preference. Core temperature is a balance between the number of rods and coolant blocks and of course what percentage they're operating at. I currently have a 12x12x12 reactor with 360 (36x 10M rods) rods in it and at 90% it's hovering right at 900C. The remaining 640 internal blocks are all cryotheum, giving me a rod:coolant ratio of around 1.78:1. In your picture it looks like you have 36 columns with nothing at all in them coolant-wise, which is definitely contributing to your heat issue. Secondly, and I'm unsure what difference this would make, you could use cryotheum for your entire reactor as that is a better coolant than resonant ender. Lastly, I wouldn't bother with the 1M gaps in between the rods. If you smash them all together you'll get better fertility and thus lower fuel consumption.

 

Unfortunately I'm useless at the moment when it comes to turbine setups so I'll leave that for others.

[Uprox]

I didnt quite want to downsize the reactor yet, and moving on and upwards into the realm of active/turbines is just how tekkit goes. as for your comment on coolant, there is some property about the resonant ender that makes it a better choice for outer most row. Something along the lines that it either bounces, or halvs the heat/radiation that makes it through it to the final outer casing point. Cant remember the exact property, but I understand it to be overall better than just pure cryo gel.

[jakalth]

1: closed system works, but you have to have both the reactor filled with water AND the turbine filled with steam, at the same time, for it to ballance out.  I always add a water feed from an infinite water source just in case.  But that's just a bit of paranoia.   Main things are, your reactor needs to have enough water in it so it can produce steam from it, and the turbines need to by set to not dump any waste to make it a closed system.

 

2: fluiducts are just not good enough to deal with a large reactor.  Most of the time they can't even handle a small reactor's output alone.  Three solutions:

 

2a: tesseract the steam to your turbines directly with no fluiducts used and return the water to your reactor using tesseracts as well, but have both steam and water on seperate channels.  Connect the *tesseracts to the output and input ports on both the turbine and reactor, directly.  Both the input/output ports and the tesseracts have no limit on how much fluids they can actually move.

 

2b: Try fluid transfer nodes and pipes.  They can move at least 8,000mb/tick of a fluid if you add a full stack(64) of both speed and mining upgrades to the transfer node.  This option is just as, if not more, expensive then using tesseracts.

 

2c: connect the output of your reactor directly to the input of your turbine by building them in contact with each other.  Cheapest option, but limits space and can be tricky to set the input/output settings correctly.

 

3: if you can balance steam production of your reactor with steam usage of your turbines, your reactor's temperature will drop dramatically, possibly down to as low as 200 if you can match the two close enough.

 

4: The three stage system doesn't really work as you described...  But a closed system with extra water being added and the overfill being dumped at the turbine, is a potential option.

 

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Your internal coolant setup.  I've never heard of anything like that with the coolants.  If it's true, that's an interesting idea.  But you'll still want coolant in the corners, if not to cool the reactor, then simply to increase the thermal transfer rate of your reactor.  You want the core and the casing to be as close to the same temp as you can get, especially for an active cooled reactor.  It's the case of the reactor that generates the steam so transferring as much heat to the outside of your reactor will help with steam generation. 

 

I also know from testing that gelid cryothium has the highest heat transfer rate of any of the fluids available in tekkit.  And it is having gelid in contact with the outside of the reactor that transfers the heat fastest.  Your idea might be valid, but I'd still suggest having the outer ring of coolant being gelid just for the transfer speed.

Edited June 28, 2014 by jakalth

[Curunir]

Not bad so far, but I think you got a few details wrong. Most importantly, an actively-cooled reactor will need extreme amounts of water at that size. If you really get it to output 50 buckets per tick of steam (i.e. the limit), that means you would have to build 25 max-sized Turbines to receive that, and pump back the respective 50 buckets of water per tick. A max-sized Turbine is a ~25000 RF/t, five-coil-ring vertical monster, so we are talking 625000 RF/t in total here. Are you sure you need more than half a million RF every single tick? That is more than ten million RF every second, enough to power over thirty (!) complete sets of fully charged Laser Drills. Or in other words, a large city.

When actively cooling, you need to use all that steam, because that is how you keep the reactor cool. The steam is the heat agent, and it needs to be used/converted. Your setup surely uses only a tiny fraction of its steam production for that puny Turbine. Leave the passive coolant blocks in there, they will help with steam efficiency. But the cooling effect comes from steam conversion. >The Core runs at just ~200°C because its steam gets used 100% by the 20 Turbines.

 

The thing with actively-cooled reactors is, they don't need to be massive. They are about three to four times more efficient per fuel ingot than passive ones if set up right. Your problem with your Godzilla there was not insufficient power output anyway, so you applied the wrong solution altogether, imo. If you want to build Turbines, go ahead. They're great. But a Turbine-driving reactor need not be nearly so huge.

You could stay with your frame size and keep it passive, with some optimizations. Just use Cryo exclusively, and don't leave those air spots in the corners. This should get it to to a good efficiency level already, and if not, change the layout to use a few rods less in favour of more coolant. That should fix it.

 

Or go ahead and build a massive battery of Turbines. Make sure to share screenshots if you do.  ;-)

Edited June 28, 2014 by Curunir

[efflandt]

Your reactor is way too massive for operating half a turbine. I left my passive reactor where it was and started from scratch to see how small a reactor would be enough for a turbine to fully power 4 laser prechargers.

 

The turbine is 7x7 with 4 ender coils and 70 blades which can produce close to 21,000 RF/t at a safe rpm. CC computer has been updated from link below to crank up full steam until 1800 rpm, then throttles the steam to meet demand from energy cells which may exceed 1800 rpm if necessary, but limited to stay below yellow speed.

 

The smallest reactor that would keep the turbine over 20,000 RF/t is 7x7 with only 1 layer of 7 fuel rods packed in a solid figure 8 with diamond blocks in the 2 dimples of the 8 surrounded by resonant ender, using rednet PRC to pulse it down if temperature goes over 380 C (control rods 0%). In SSP I tried cryo gel, but there was not much difference (maybe slightly cooler, but negligible efficiency difference).

 

With the turbine in direct contact with the reactor, fluid ports directly connect internally (once I got that right), water loss is easily made up feeding 4 aqueous accumulators through fluiduct to the reactor.

 

This set up (in pocket dimension w/gold door on SMP server) produces over 20,000 RF/t using less than 3 yellowrium ingots per hour (over 20 minutes each).