Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

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Avezo
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Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Avezo »

See the nuclear build I'm working on atm. It has perfect ratio of 1 water pump per 20 steam turbines, yet 3 left-side turbines in each column for some reason don't get enough steam, despite there being enough heat and water provided, the rest of rows work fine (see pictures).

Any tips how to fix this? Or is it just weird fluid mechanics thingy and nothing can be done?

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Last edited by Avezo on Sun Sep 16, 2018 11:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

Zavian
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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Zavian »

Upload the save please.

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Avezo »

Zavian wrote:
Sun Sep 16, 2018 11:55 am
Upload the save please.
Added it to the first post.

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Zavian »

Ok I built the blueprint to have a better look (before you uploaded the save).

Your ratios look off. See https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ar_ratios/ or the nuclear section of https://wiki.factorio.com/Power_production.

According to the reddit post, you need 80 heat exchangers, 138 turbines and 7 water pumps to fully utilise the 6 reactors.

You don't have enough water to fully utilise the heat exchangers that you do have. (Each water pump can supply about 11-12 heat exchangers. If I recall correctly they use 103 units of water per second).

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Avezo »

Actually, I've seen that post long ago. That 11/12 heat exchanger per pump comes from 1 pump per 20 turbines, for which to fully convert water to steam you'd need slightly above 11 exchangers, thus 12 is taken. But they don't consume water themselves, putting more of them just makes them not work 100% of time, so it shouldn't have any impact here.

I will actually try adding more pumps or removing a row or two, but it shouldn't have any effect, amount of water provided to this setup already equals amount of water consumed.

EDIT:
See this example:
Picture


There is ratio 1 pump per 20 turbines, but vastly more exchangers than needed, yet all turbines get fully supplied. Exchangers just don't work 100% of the time. It's actually the setup from which I started trying to build more compact version with exchangers from both sides of turbines.

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Zavian »

In the copy I built the both rows of heat exchangers to the left of the turbines are perpetually short of water and empty of steam, whilst the heat exchangers to the right of the turbines have plenty of water and most of them are also full of steam.

That suggests that maybe the problem is update order. The heat exchangers to the left of the turbines are converting all their water to steam, pushing that enough of that steam into the turbines that most of the exchangers to the right of the turbines can't empty themselves of steam. The simplest way to solve that would be to not feed the turbines from both the left and the right.

Your initial blueprint might also make a potential test case for Dominic's fluid rework (once he is ready to test new code).

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Avezo »

Yeah, I were afraid it might be fluid dynamics, will post it in FFF thread. Thanks for the help.

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by BlueTemplar »

It's especially weird that it's the exchangers closest to the pumps that seem to lack water !
Have you tried to check what happens with Debug Mode option show-fluid-box-fluid-info-on ?
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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Loewchen »

The update order favours flow from left to right and therefore the turbines use more steam from the left than from the right heat exchangers causing water starvation on the left and excess on the right.
You can compensate that with an additional offshore pump to the left pipeline of each column.

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by BlueTemplar »

Yeah, but the weird part is that the pumps *should* output (just) enough water (turned into steam) to be able to power *all* the turbines.
So any disbalance *should* eventually correct itself as the extra steam coming from a disbalance in steam exchanger's steam production backs up in the turbines.
But, according to the OP, this is not happening...

To the OP : have you tested the setup long enough for any transient effects to disappear?
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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Zavian »

Reducing the number of heat exchangers from 14 to 13 per column also fixes things for me.

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by BlueTemplar »

With or without keeping 20 turbines per column?
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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Zavian »

I reduced the number of turbines as well. But you could probably keep 20 turbines provided you made sure that 1 pump feeds exactly 20 turbines. eg Image (image from Avezo's earlier post).

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Re: Weird lack of water/steam in nuclear plant

Post by Avezo »

BlueTemplar wrote:
Sun Sep 16, 2018 6:16 pm
To the OP : have you tested the setup long enough for any transient effects to disappear?
Yeah, I've tried removing and adding turbines and heat exchangers in various places, it eventually always ended up in those 3 turbines being wonky.

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