loganb wrote:
With the current way the heat pipes work, however, it doesn't seem practical for three reasons:
1) Heat drains out of the reactor and pipes verrry slowly making the feedback time very looong
2) When the heat pipes reach 500C, the steam engines drop to zero output in only a few seconds
3) Single quantities of fuel can't be loaded into the reactor (since the number of fuel elements in the reactor cannot be sensed)
1) Like in real life. Even coal power plant can't rapidly increase output:)
2) Alien "water" has critical point ta 500C and sub critical steam would damage super critical turbines.
3) And this one is serious. You can. Just look at used up fuel cells.
A couple of chests, inserters, combinators.
You have outside signal that tells 'we need power' (for example low level of steam in tanks), but the inserter put a cell only if there is no cell (including "now burning one!")
inside. How to check that? by looking for used up cell.
[reactor]
A B
r c
D
p
p - provider chest, to get rid of used up cells
r - requester, to store a couple of fuel cells.
c - just a chest.
B - inserter that goes down, always working.
D (down) and A (goes up), inserters working when signal "U" in on.
Signal U is (low level of steam) && (there is used up fuel cell in chest c).
For bigger setup of n reactors you need to synchronize everything change
the second conditin to (there is n fuel used up cells in all chest c).
How it works? Let's assume we start from working reactors. Buffer is filled up,
cells burn out, used up cells put in c; then buffer is depleted, combinators send signal U,
a ful cell is inserted into reactors, used up cell is moved to provider chest.
There a small 2x2 reactor that use this system (I use it with belts, but the one with logistic chest is a bit simpler).
It has only one tank for a buffer, because it hold energy in heatpipes (16 heatpipes can hold whole cell, reactor is like 10 heatpipes), not in steam. So it is 116MW reactor (of cource can be expanded) but with +200% bonuses and without heat lost.
loganb wrote:
I thought about this, but if you're only using 1.5 reactors worth of power, there's no efficiency gained from running 4 reactors and then just wasting the heat. The accumulator farm necessary to store the output of 4 reactors would be insane, I'm guessing steam tanks would be similarly unwieldy.
Nah. Look above
4 reactors, maximum power 116MW (almost 3 reactors without bonuses), minimum power - 0. Keep heat in heatpipes. The important thing is to have more (in the sense of steam production, consumption) heat exchangers than turbines, so when reactor heat up, thje one tank used to meansure level would be filled.