Factorio Forums

E Boiler


An Electric Boiler for when you just need steam in one of those hard to reach places

Details:

Factorio Version: 0.15
Released: May 18th 2017
License: MIT License


Download -
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/timer67/eboiler

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Balancing,
Need to work out just how much power this thing should use, suggestions are welcome!

Not to trow you down or anything however.
An electrical boiler that can auto sustain itself is bad in general, it defeats the purpose of itself (to change a burnable item into electric energy at a 50% effective).
The first issue most have is that they produce too little energy and investing in more machines is expensive (but we must do it), now image that they do not take coal but take part of the energy they create?
If they need 510 kW (let's say 1 steam engine to have a 50% free profit) then you have to at least duplicate your investment and electrical plaza to generate those kW.
If you want a way to power up place far away i would suggest looking in another direction, if you are keen on modding you may create a mod for another way to do it (geothermal, wind, hell you could replicate the ARC reactor from Iron man).

Its isn't supposed to be able to self sustain itself, that's why i'm looking for balancing ideas on how much power it should draw

Its supposed to be for places where a full scale boiler setup would be a pain or just won't fit (like for steam cracking away from the main base).
In general you should be losing out when you use one, aside from the fact that you don't need to cart coal around.

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For example, in the current version of the mod it takes 3 boilers and 5 engines to power a single electric boiler.

Also a electric boiler can't be powered by engines connected to it, the grid just shorts out and the setup breaks.

If you're sneaky and pipe the steam away from the main boiler, connect engines to it and then route the power back to the boiler there isn't enough power produced to fully operate the boiler. So even if you used a recursive setup, you have no net gain and lose the steam you placed the boiler there for in the first place.

timer67 wrote:Need to work out just how much power this thing should use, suggestions are welcome!

33% efficient is low, and I'd probably pipe in steam (or even use tank trains) rather than take such an energy hit.

My recommendation is to make it 90% efficient, but only produce 125C steam. Assuming there's no minimum temperature for steam cracking, it will allow you to efficiently set up your steam cracking, while still being fairly useless as a replacement for batteries.

I'm not sure if adjusting the production rate is possible, Boilers all seem to have the same output and input numbers.

Power seems to be the biggest variable available.

For coal fired:

Coal contains 8 MJ of energy, and boilers are 50% efficient, so every mining drill generates 2.1 MJ/second in the boilers.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Power_production

Real world for a steam turbine:

Practical thermal efficiency of a steam turbine varies with turbine size, load condition, gap losses and friction losses. They reach top values up to about 50% in a 1200 MW turbine; smaller ones have a lower efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_tur ... efficiency

So maybe set the electrical boiler the same? 50% efficient. Fairly serious loss without making it excessive to the point where it isn't worth using.

I will play with the numbers to the point it isn't crippling, but can't be used to cause a recursive infinite power loop.

Looks like I have lots of experimenting to do tommorow

During WW2, Austria lacked coal, which in turn resulted in a transport problem due to idle steam locomotives (like in most of Europe). They wanted to build a bunch of electric locomotives because they could run on hydro power, but metal shortage prevented that plan. They then put electric heaters in steam locomotives and powered those from hydropower. The experiment worked quite well, but they used more electricity than electric locomotives pulling the same load at the same speed, meaning they had lower efficiency. They were replaced by electrics as soon as metal became available and no electric-steam locomotive have been preserved.

This means the idea of an electric boiler is not stupid. It's useful in some cases, but won't be able to compete against coal in a direct comparison. Instead it could make sense to have steam tanks, which fills during the day from solar energy and then avoids/reduces coal usage during the night. It should be less efficient than batteries, but it seems like a good idea prior to inventing batteries. And yeah it allows easier access to steam cracking and similar. Perhaps it could be made possible to get a circuit signal, which indicate if you are running on 100% green energy and then power boilers if that's the case, but cut power if coal is being used.

I would say give it 90% efficiency. Remember it's just converting electricity to steam. Boiler efficiency comes in afterwards, meaning a standard 50% boiler will result in a total of 45% efficiency.

However do we really need an electric boiler for: coal->steam->electricity->steam? Why not just make solid fuel on the spot and feed that into the boiler on location of the oil refinery? Another take would be to make a boiler, which can burn oil. Two water input/output, one oil input and one steam output. Should be more efficient than converting to solid fuel and burn that. Power output, fuel consumption and pollution should then depend on the type of oil being burned. It would be nice to be able to burn crude oil if you for some reason is low on refinery capacity. Part of the key to making Factorio good is flexibility, which allows picking the solution, which works best in the current situation and not just relying on standard solutions.

You all are missing the point. The purpose is to make steam for oil recipes, not power production.

I think 50% sounds right. Here are two rationales for 50%:

Steel Furnace uses 180kW of fuel energy.
Electric Furnace uses 180kW of energy, which is 180kW of electricity (i.e. from solar) or 360kW of fuel energy if used via boilers.

By the game's logic, 180kW of electricity is equivalent to 180kW of fuel energy when used to heat things. Therefore, it should take the same treatment as fuel energy when put through a boiler - 50%.

Unlike real life, factorio fluids seem to be poor at absorbing heat energy, but are exceptional at releasing that energy. The mod should be consistent with factorio, not real life.

Usually the electric boiler will be used with Solar or Nuclear. Note that even with the 50% penalty, it would still be better using the electric boiler than nuclear steam, because nuclear steam is at 500 degrees and contains 3.2x the energy as 165 degree steam. So if you convert that nuclear steam to electricity and put that electricity through a 50% efficient boiler which puts out 165 degree steam, you still end up performing 62% more coal liquefaction than using the nuclear steam directly.

Ranakastrasz wrote:You all are missing the point. The purpose is to make steam for oil recipes, not power production.

That may be the purpose, but there's no harm in thinking the rest through. E.g. Nightinggale's idea of (indirectly) solar-heating water in order to generate power at night without accumulators is a good one, though probably making an effective power plant this way would be hard.

"Inefficiency" usually means waste heat, so electric heaters themselves are normally 100% efficient or very close to it. On the other hand, coal plant efficiency is 32-42% according to figures I can find. I don't know whether in-game energy numbers reflect this, but anywhere from 2-3 coal boilers to power one electric boiler (assuming the same steam output) makes sense.

And I don't think this is unbalanced in the game anyway; electricity isn't really that hard to make (short of the quantities used by module-heavy mega factories).

BlakeMW wrote:I think 50% sounds right. Here are two rationales for 50%:

Steel Furnace uses 180kW of fuel energy.
Electric Furnace uses 180kW of energy, which is 180kW of electricity (i.e. from solar) or 360kW of fuel energy if used via boilers.

By the game's logic, 180kW of electricity is equivalent to 180kW of fuel energy when used to heat things. Therefore, it should take the same treatment as fuel energy when put through a boiler - 50%.

That would be a 100% efficient boiler and 50% efficient steam engine. Having both at 50% would result in 0.5*0.5 = 25% efficiency.

leoch wrote:On the other hand, coal plant efficiency is 32-42% according to figures I can find.

Sounds about right. 38% is pretty much the standard when building standard powerplants while the highest I know of is 49% and that one is custom built/modified for research in efficiency. Another interesting fact is that steam engines heats up water as a byproduct, mainly from cooling the condenser (which increase power efficiency). This means getting 45% power and 50% heat is in use. In other words they take in cold water and heat it to 80 °C, which can then be used for whatever you want to use hot water for, like baths to industry. Usually heat exchangers are in use to avoid using the water, which runs through the powerplant itself.

This actually gives me an idea. Could it be useful to have water heating abilities in steam engine ingame? Say 50% electricity and 25% hot water. What would we need the water for besides running steam engines?

I've lowered energy usage slightly, trying to cut it down to the point where you can't cause a recursive loop but actually keep it usable.

Tell me what you think

Nightinggale wrote: This actually gives me an idea. Could it be useful to have water heating abilities in steam engine ingame? Say 50% electricity and 25% hot water. What would we need the water for besides running steam engines?

IRL waste heat from processes is used for heating, the problem is that by then most the energy which can be used for performing work, has already been extracted, if more work can be extracted, it would have been. So it is used for heating, either human beings or potentially other biological processes (i.e. greenhouses, bioreactors). But in Factorio there isn't much which needs heating.

IRL steam engines can work in basically one of two ways, either they take high pressure steam and then release low pressure steam into the environment, or they condense the steam back into hot water and recirculate it back through the boiler to increase efficiency relative to heating cold water. Factorio steam engines are of the former kind, but even in the latter case you don't really get to siphon off the hot water - doing so defeats the purpose of starting with pre-heated water.

BlakeMW wrote:IRL steam engines can work in basically one of two ways, either they take high pressure steam and then release low pressure steam into the environment, or they condense the steam back into hot water and recirculate it back through the boiler to increase efficiency relative to heating cold water. Factorio steam engines are of the former kind, but even in the latter case you don't really get to siphon off the hot water - doing so defeats the purpose of starting with pre-heated water.

Not entirely correct. Steam engines works like this:

1. A boiler creates steam
2. The steam pushes on a piston
3. When the piston moves the other way, the steam is let out
4. The exhaust steam pile goes through water, which condenses the steam back into water
5. the water can be used in the boiler again

Only 1-3 are critical. The rest are optional.
#4 causes rapid condensation, which lowers the pressure to below normal air pressure, which in turn sucks on the piston. This means the difference in pressure on the two sides of the piston increases, hence creating a greater force without using more steam. This means higher efficiency.
#5 is useful because the water isn't contaminated with minerals, which will be left behind in the boiler. This is particularly useful for steam ships as steam engines can't use salt water.

Mobile steam engines (mainly cars and trains) lack the space and water for a condenser and will have to run without step 4 and 5. Since trains can't lower the pressure on the back of the piston, they increase the pressure difference by increasing boiler pressure. It wasn't uncommon for steam locomotives to have 3 times the boiler pressure as factory engines at the same time. Needless to say, higher pressure boilers came with issues as well as a not insignificant price tag.

Using step 4 produces hot water while the engine delivers more power, meaning increase in efficiency. Using it too much means cooling down the system and hot water is produced at the cost of power production. It's a balance, but claiming that hot water production always decrease power production is incorrect.

It doesn't really matter if the steam engine use pistons or turbines. The power output of a turbine depends on the pressure in the intake and the pressure in the exit, meaning using a condenser to make a vacuum on the exit pipe will increase efficiency.

Still doesn't change the fact that Factorio has little use for heated water, at least for the time being. Perhaps boilers could be used to use less fuel the hotter the input water, meaning you would decrease fuel usage (hence pollution) if you make the water circle. You would still need to add water over and over though as the steam engines in the game leaks lots of steam.

Sadly i'm not sure that possible (or at least its not possible for a modder with my skill level at the least)

The boilers function is as simple as
Take water - Burn/Consume energy - Set water to X temperature (defined in the boiler settings)

now i assume the temperature of the incoming fluid is kept somewhere, but changing the energy cost on the fly is the bit i don't really have a reference for.
Something to work on perhaps.

Ranakastrasz wrote:You all are missing the point. The purpose is to make steam for oil recipes, not power production.

I'd also love to see a setup where these are used with solar in place of accumulators. In other words, use solar + electric boilers to make steam during the day, then use stored steam at night for power.

Its possible nightingale, wouldn't be too efficient though.

But since people are doing no walking challenges these days, i think you could do anything if you set your mind to it :p

... I was just thinking of making a mod like this. Thanks for having the idea first and doing it so I don't have to learn how to do it myself!

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