Steam per MW

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gapi
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Steam per MW

Post by gapi »

I taught i would be interesting to know how much steam you get per MW

I tested how much you get from coal witch is 8MW and it's about 134 units of steam.
Whit a simple caculation you get the following
1 MW=16.75steam
1 wood(4MW)=67steam
1 coal(8MW)=134steam
1 solid fule(25MW)=418.75steam
1 rocket fule(225MW)=3768.75steam

Thanks for reading

Forgot about the uranium fule cell
1 Uranium fuel cell(8GW-8000MW)=134000steam witch is 35.5 times as much as soild fule

while doing th uranium i found that evrything is in Juls and not in Watts, but in the game it was Watts so ...
Last edited by gapi on Fri Dec 01, 2017 6:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

DOSorDIE
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Re: Steam per MW

Post by DOSorDIE »

More intresting where how much steam it get from 1 Nuclear fuel (200 sec) ;)

Escadin
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Re: Steam per MW

Post by Escadin »

I would actually really want to know how much max temperature steam you can get from 1 fuel cell and also how much j that is, given a perfect no-loss 100% efficiency setup.
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Laogeodritt
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Re: Steam per MW

Post by Laogeodritt »

DOSorDIE wrote:More intresting where how much steam it get from 1 Nuclear fuel (200 sec)
Specific heat of water in Factorio is 200J/(°C*unit). In other words, it takes 200J to heat up one unit of water by 1°C.[1]

Water starts at 15°C when from barrels or an offshore pump. Steam produced by heat exchangers is at 500°C exactly (heat exchanger won't work below 500°C, and will produce steam at a controlled 500°C if the temperature is above that). That means that the heat exchanger is increasing the temperature by 485°C, which requires 485°C*200J = 97kJ per unit of water to be converted into one unit of steam.

The uranium fuel cell contains 8GJ[2]. Therefore, 8GJ / 97kJ/unit = 82.5 kunits of steam. (Reminder that G = 10^9 = billions, M = 10^6 = millions and k = 10^3 = thousands).

You could also get to this number by other means, e.g., knowing that a fuel cell lasts for 200s and one reactor outputs 40MW = 40MJ/s for that duration. 40MW/97kJ/unit = 412.37 units/s of steam produced. In 200s, that's 82.5 kunits of steam. This equivalency is obvious if you examine the 200s runtime and 40MW nuclear reactor output: multiply those together and that's 8GJ that we were using earlier!

(Calculated numbers are roudned to three sigfigs.)

In both cases, note that this assumes you don't have neighbour bonuses. If you have a neighbour bonus of 100%, you effectively get 16GJ out of the one fuel cell, etc. for higher bonuses—yes, there is an apparent violation of conservation of energy at play. You might argue that the system is not 100% efficient (8GJ is not actual energy contents of a fuel cell, just a "nominal yield"), and that a lot of energy is lost to the environment in the reactor for whatever reason but having more reactors together reduces that loss—maybe being all together they lose less heat to the environment? So in effect fuel cells have more than 40GJ of energy (= neighbour bonus of 400%), but huge losses. I have no idea if this makes any sense from a real-life nuclear power engineering perspective.

We could just call it video game logic, though.
gapi wrote:I taught i would be interesting to know how much steam you get per MW

I tested how much you get from coal witch is 8MW and it's about 134 units of steam.
This depends on the temperature of the steam (I think burners get you 160°C, but heat exchangers always produce 500°C steam). Remember, water has a specific heat capacity, that's where your energy is going to increase water temperature to turn it into steam. (In real life, it would also have a latent heat of vapourisation, but as far as I know, Factorio skips this extra energy requirement.)
while doing th uranium i found that evrything is in Juls and not in Watts, but in game it was Watts so ...
These are different quantities. A joule is a unit of energy; a watt is a unit of power ( = energy/time, more precisely 1 W = 1 J per second). You need to make sure you're interpreting these quantities correctly and using them correctly.

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Re: Steam per MW

Post by Tekky »

gapi wrote:Forgot about the uranium fule cell
1 Uranium fuel cell(8GW-8000MW)=134000steam witch is 35.5 times as much as soild fule
When comparing burning fossil fuel in a boiler and uranium fuel in a nuclear reactor, one does not only have to take neighbor bonus into account, but also that the boiler has only 50% efficiency, whereas a nuclear reactor has, as far as I know, even without neighbor bonus 100% efficiency.

For this reason, I believe that your above calculation is wrong by a factor of 2 (or more if you take neighbor bonus into account).

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