Enthalpy of steam with nuclear power

[canoeguy11]

Hello!

I was wanting to discuss the apparent enthalpy of the steam that is made now. It seems that your able to create and store 500c steam indefinitely, which is then cycled through your turbine system for the use.

Was this the intent? Right now I have many heat exchangers running to capture as much energy as I can from the nuke chamber and storing it in fluid tanks.

My expectation would be that there are diminished returns when storing energy as steam due to the entropy loss to the system.

Could you please comment?

Canoeguy11

[ssilk]

This is a suggestion board. So what do you suggest as "right" behavior?

[canoeguy11]

Ahh, apologies.

My suggestion is that the ambient temperature be used in a calculation that reduced the temperature of the gas, steam at 500c, based on thermodynamics.

Such a calculation would be s=C*ln(T2/T1) to suggest that the entropy would decay over time
Or s=4.2x10^3 * ln((500+273)/25+273))

A novel solution would say that the decay of steam could be a coefficient of .5 while steam 163 would be more like .9

Such a process could be implemented within storage tanks to say: steam500f = steam500i * time * coefficient
Such that over one game hour the steam would decay by half.

[ssilk]

Something like that is problematic in implementing and questionable in game-play-value.

First because it costs a lot of CPU cycles, even if you do such a calculation only once per minute per tank: Some players have hundreds of tanks (cause they are useful for storing steam ).

And to do it "right" you don't need to check only the tanks, but also all pipes. That can be thousands of entities.

Second is problematic, cause if that is reduced by half within an hour only those players that use a lot of tanks to store steam for a long time will be affected by that. And so what? You need some more fuel (whatever), not so advanced player wouldn't even notice that.

[canoeguy11]

What I am really trying to get at is, steam made in situ should have higher energy efficiency as opposed to storing it. As is, I can run my nukes flat out for 1 game hour and store enough steam to power my factory for 8. Obviously that varies by save, but the idea is sound.

Agreed, calculations like that would bog down the system.

What I’m particularly talking about would best be implemented only in the system of storage tanks and/or the literal amount of Steam500 in the game at any given point. The global amount of steam would be what the calculation could run on. Rather than storing a discrete amount of steam in each ‘device,’ give it a ratio of the total. That is to say… with 500 storage tanks, each would be assigned 1/500th of the total value. Once the ratio is mapped, it’ll just reference up.

This generally works only because I am slightly unsure of how your system handles the concept of pressure. If you’re only using pipes as a bottleneck for flow rate, this would only be ideal for tanks directly adjacent, and thus change the size of the relative system. Instead of global you would just treat a 10x10 patch of tanks like 1 large tank.

Logically this should be true for any type of fluid. Given a continuous storage system, the fluid will optimize rather than make patches of higher concentration.

[ssilk]

Factorio doesn't have pressure due to obvious reasons (CPU), the calculations to handle real thermodynamics would slow down the game to unplayable speed.

It works so: Any entity that can handle liquids has minimum one fluid-box. A fluid-box knows just "current amount" and "max amount". That can be translated to a "level" (current amount must be lower or equal to max amount). Which represents the pressure of one entity. The level is what you see in the windows of tank/pipe and in the info-window.

A "flow" is initiated, if the level (or pressure) between two connected entities is different. This is made by "moving" liquid of one entity to the other, so that the level becomes more equal. The result is: The liquid "flows" through the pipes.

And to the temperature: If you have liquids of different temperature, the resulting temperature is calculated, as if you mix two liquids.

That is the basic concept. What you suggest let me think, that you think there is just like in other game-simulations something like a simulation of steam for tanks, for pipes and so on. But this is not the case here: The liquids flow from A to B by some kind of realtime-simulation, that behaves more or less like a liquid, but it really needs a lot of CPU-resources to simulate that.

And I still don't see much use in this if I look on it for a valuable gameplay with that. It's just a resource-sink to keep the temperture up in storage tanks.