[0.11.x] Uranium Power

[Fatmice]

Hello all,

Since Liquius bowed out due to time constraints, I and a friend have stepped in to continue development of this mod. This post will served as a continuation of Liquius' first post. All future announcements will be linked back to this post.

Ideas, plans, and thoughts for the mod.

Current version: 0.5.3 -> Download

Example build updated to 0.5.3 -> Download

Description of build

• Gross Power up to 52.224 MW, 50.4 MW stable.
• Upkeep Power of 6.6 MW, 6 MW if not counting lamps and lasers.
• Net Power production is 44.4 MW (50.4 MW - 6 MW).
• Some pumps and pipes have been removed/added for better heat transfer.
• Example base expanded to show use of new heat exchangers.
• More descriptions can be found here.

Overview of base

Base-cominbed.jpg (1.76 MiB) Viewed 11847 times

Closeup of the reactor build

Base-cominbed_close.jpg (6.11 MiB) Viewed 11847 times

Production and enrichment chains

Example-9-03.jpg (904.08 KiB) Viewed 12192 times

Current work will be here.
https://github.com/Fatmice/Uranium-Power-Cont

Past releases have been archived to here.
https://github.com/Fatmice/UraniumPower
---------------------------------
Version History

0.5.3_01 - Feb 16, 2015

• Added missing recipes to migration scripts.
• Added two fluid recipes to heat exchange pressurised-water to pressurised-water
• Reverted reactor heat handicap to 0.35 and 0.2 for pressurised-water and water, respectively. Normal performance expected.
• Added a method to compensate heat dispersion due to conservative tick update in new heat exchanger. Heat exchange performance improved slightly.
• Expected performance of Big Heat Exchanger x4 using pressurised-water to water : 23.040 MW(electric) from 72 MW reactor, 54.720 MW(electric) from 144 MW reactor.
• Expected performance of Big Heat Exchanger x4 using water to water : 15.360 MW(electric) from 72 MW reactor, 25.920 MW(electric) from 144 MW reactor.
• Expected performance of Small Heat Exchanger will be proportionally less but still useful depending on what one needs.

0.5.3 - Feb 16, 2015

• Added graphics for heat exchanger made by Liquius.
• Added graphics, icon, crafting recipes, fluid recipes, research unlock for two new heat exchangers of assembler-prototype.
• New heat exchangers come in chiral pairs labeled as (S) and (R).
• New heat exchangers will power themselves when their fluidboxes are filled. Ignore the empty fuel notice or fuel it with solid fuel if it will make you happy.
• The red and blue marks on the tank of the new heat exchangers denote the incoming hot and cold fluid, respectively. This is to help you identify and orient the heat exchangers more easily.
• New heat exchangers consume less update ticks and should provide comparable heat exchange performance.
• Reactors no longer need reactor-fuel.
• Increased Reactors energy_consumption but capped heat output internally.
• Reactor performance should be on par if not out-perform those of previous versions.
• Fast-pump speed increased to 4x so new throughput is 240 units fluid / s.
• Added migration script for updating from 0.5.2. If heat exchanger is not performing right after loading of save, break and replace them.
• Reorganized many file structures, name, groups, sub-groups, and crafting categories.

0.5.2 - Feb 2, 2015

• Tweaked icons to better convey information.
• Renamed enrichment chain to better convey information.
• Fast-pump mineable changed to fast-pump instead of small-pump
• Added Uranium Power group and moved all things concerning this mod under this new group.
• This release should be compatible with saved game since 0.5.1.

---------------------------------
Archived Releases

0.5.2 - Feb 2, 2015

• 0.5.2 - Mod
• 0.5.2 - Example Build

[/list]

[Fatmice]

Hello all,

A small status update as to what is going on. I'm working on 0.5.3. It is almost done. I just need to work on graphics.

Changes to be expected in 0.5.3.

• Reactor fuel is deprecated. It is no longer needed nor required. However, until fuel_inventory_size = 0 is allowed, I can not eliminate the insertion of "stuff" into the reactor building. Simply use an inserter to remove the fuel from the reactor building or remove the fuel assemblies and allow the fuel to be consumed before replacing them back to the reactor chest.
• Reactors will get energy injected directly into their energy buffers. The amount of energy is proportional to the amount of fuel-assemblies and their types. For now, nothing needs to be done by the users. Your reactors should function just like normal. In the near future though, when I implement fuel decay (0.5.4), you will need to figure how to balance the fuel-assemblies.
• Reactor heat output are now hard coded and capped. The energy_consumption also increased 72 MW and 140 MW for 3by3 and 5by5, respectively.
• MW(heat) -> MW(electric) will depend on the fluid used in the reactor. 20% conversion for water, and 35% for pressurized-water. There is no change to the MW(electric) after conversion if you are using pressurized-water so you will get 25 MW and 50 MW from 3by3 or 5by5, respectively.
• A new heat exchanger is available. It is based on an assembly-prototype. It is 100% efficient since I already accounted for the Rankine cycle in the reactor. You only need this building if you are doing a closed primary loop. It is highly advisable to use this building if you are using pressurized-water. Two versions of this building will be available, one for the 3by3 and one for 5by5 reactors. Depending on the fluid, the heat exchanger will provide enough heat for either 10 or 20 steam-generators. These heat exchangers will consume less game ticks than the current heat exchanger.
• The current heat exchanger will get a new graphic and will still be available for use. I plan on leaving it in for posterity.

I expect a release some time this week.

[MasterBuilder]

pressurized-water

Would I be correct in assuming this will be introduced by this mod? Unless one of the recent updates added it I am unaware of any 'pressurized-water'.

[Fatmice]

Would I be correct in assuming this will be introduced by this mod? Unless one of the recent updates added it I am unaware of any 'pressurized-water'.

Hi, it's already in 0.5.2. It was introduced back in 0.5.0 by Liquius. It is made in the pump-like building by transforming in 1:1 ratio of water to pressurized-water.

[SKleen75]

Hi.
I cant get the heat exchanger to work. The water on one side has 300 degrees, the water on the other side stays at 15 degrees.
What do i possibly wrong?

Greedings
SKleen75

[MasterBuilder]

Hi.
I cant get the heat exchanger to work. The water on one side has 300 degrees, the water on the other side stays at 15 degrees.
What do i possibly wrong?

In order for the exchange to really work you have to alternate directions past them, i.e.:
------>
XXXXX
<-----
Running both in the same direction will not work as you think and will actually 'balance' the temp between the two liquids.

If the exchangers aren't actually doing anything you could try removing and placing them again. (This has worked for me.)

[Liquius]

In order for the exchange to really work you have to alternate directions past them, i.e.:
------>
XXXXX
<-----

This is incorrect. With the current implementation a heat exchanger will average the temperature between the two pipes every tick. It only takes into account the quantity and heat capacity of the fluid.

If the exchangers aren't actually doing anything you could try removing and placing them again. (This has worked for me.)

This is correct. If it stops working for any reason, replacing it should always work.

[MasterBuilder]

This is incorrect. With the current implementation a heat exchanger will average the temperature between the two pipes every tick. It only takes into account the quantity and heat capacity of the fluid.

Lets say we have water in two pipes, This would be the result with a long enough exchange. ('X' being the exchanger)
0----------->50
XXXXXXXXXXXX
100--------->50
If they both flow in the same direction then they are going to even out.

If you alternate them you get this:
0<-----50-----100
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
0------50---->100

(In practice you won't actually lose that much heat but I'm just trying to demonstrate the principal here.)

I may not have been succinct in my original statement but is this wrong?

[Fatmice]

Counterflow is the only way to get the entering cold fluid to equal in temperature to the entering hotfluid. This is how it works in real life and is how the code emulates.

Since heat will no longer flow between fluid of the same temperature, when you have both fluids flowing in the same direction and at the same velocity, they will end up with half the amount of heat or [(V1 * temp1) + (V2 * temp2)] / (V1 + V2) because the "packet" of fluids are the same. In order to achieve close to the same temperature as counterflow, the hotfluid will need to flow at least 2x faster than the coldfluid as this allows the coldfluid to sample hotter "packets" of fluid.

Code: Select all

Hotfluid -> Fast pump ->    100----------50<T<100 => return to hot source
                               XXXXXXXXXX
Coldfluid -> Normal pump -> 15-----------50<T<100 => to power production

[SKleen75]

Hi.
I dont get it.

I have pressurized water coming from the reactor wir 300 degrees and i have pressurized water running from pumps along the heat exchangers to the steam machines with 15 degrees.

It flows in alternate directions but all that happens is that the waterflow drops.

Greedings
SKleen75

[Liquius]

Hi.
I dont get it.

I have pressurized water coming from the reactor wir 300 degrees and i have pressurized water running from pumps along the heat exchangers to the steam machines with 15 degrees.

It flows in alternate directions but all that happens is that the waterflow drops.

Greedings
SKleen75

I am guessing that those pipes are not vanilla pipes. Currently the heat exchangers only work with vanilla pipes.

[MasterBuilder]

Hi.
I dont get it.

I have pressurized water coming from the reactor wir 300 degrees and i have pressurized water running from pumps along the heat exchangers to the steam machines with 15 degrees.

It flows in alternate directions but all that happens is that the waterflow drops.

Greedings
SKleen75

In order for the closed loop to work it can't be completely filled with water. I don't know how much you have in there but I would suggest you pipe the return from the reactor into a tank and out from that into the reactor. Fill the tank 1/2 way and it should continuously flow.
If there isn't enough water that will also cause issues.
(Make sure you're using fast pumps. You may also require a chain of them pumping from the tank into the reactor.)

EDIT: And as Liquius says, use vanilla pipes.

[Fatmice]

Hi.
I dont get it.

I have pressurized water coming from the reactor wir 300 degrees and i have pressurized water running from pumps along the heat exchangers to the steam machines with 15 degrees.

It flows in alternate directions but all that happens is that the waterflow drops.

Greedings
SKleen75

Hi, your image shows the pipes you used at the heat exchangers are not vanilla pipes. As others have said, the heat exchangers only work with vanilla pipes. Try to change the pipes adjacent to the heat exchanger to vanilla pipes, break and replace the heat exchangers to see if that solves your issue. The new heat exchanger that I'm introducing in 0.5.3 will be compatible with all pipes, including modded ones.

Second possible source for your problem is that the closed loop can not be completely full. Factorio fluid simulation is like a bunch of chests where a pipe is just a chest. The fluid is moved from chest to chest so when the chests are full, very little, if anything at all, will be moved. If your system is working, you will see that the heat output by the heat exchangers will decrease as the closed loop gets more full. You can fine tune the amount of fluid in your close loop by having a storage tank as part of the loop. A storage tank is simply a pipe(chest) with a large capacity and allows the fluids to be sloshed around more easily.

Third, you mention that your water flow dropped, but I am unclear if you meant the flow in the closed loop or the open loop leading to your steam-engines. In the case of water flow dropped in the closed loop, this can be caused by the pump that is pushing fluid back into the reactor building. Just remove this pump and water level should return to the pipes. What a pump does is to try to get all of the liquid behind it and dump them to the front. This artificially causes a waterflow issue that you might be seeing. In the case of water flow dropped in the open loop, this can be caused by your steam-generators consuming fluid that has no heat, i.e. fluid at their default_temperature, which in your case for pressurized-water is 25C. The more heat the fluid has, the less of it is consumed by the steam-engines.

If you get your system working, you can further optimize by minimizing the amount of above ground pipe leading to the heat exchangers. You may not know this but the amount of fluid that can travel through X amount of pipe is inversely related to that number. This means the longer your pipes, the less amount of fluid that can transported. You can mitigate this with pumps, but only up to a point. A set of underground pipes (going down and going up) counts as one pipe. So by minimizing the pipes, you maximize the available throughput of the liquid and therefore amount of heat that can be exchanged by the heat exchangers.

I suggest you take a look at the example build that I've provided before attempting to build your own. The example build has all that you need to enjoy the mod without experiencing the major pitfalls.

[SKleen75]

Hi.

Thanks a lot. Now it´s working.

Yes. The modded pipes were the main reason for the failure.

Thank you for your help.

Greedings
SKleen75

[Fatmice]

Hello all,

0.5.3 is released after much work. See release notes for more details. Next release will focus on introducing two new buildings, reactor recirculation pump and turbine generator building. These two are sorely needed to deal with fluid throughput problems as well as the shear number of steam-engines used to generate power. Please download the example build to check out the new heat exchangers. Let me know about MP issues if they occur and I'll see what to do about them.

new-heat-exchangers.jpg (382.31 KiB) Viewed 11640 times

[MasterBuilder]

0.5.3 is released

A few issues/questions:
Upgrading from 5.2 and I got an error in control.lua on 288, "Attempt to perform arithmetic on field '?' (nil value)".
(Esc closes it; I removed all replaced all reactors and heat exchangers and all seems to be working. (No error on load after this.))

Migrations seem to be missing the "Big (R) Exchanger":

Code: Select all

-- Enabled new building and recipes
for index, force in pairs(game.forces) do
	if force.technologies["sulfur-processing"].researched then
		force.recipes["S-new-heat-exchanger-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["R-new-heat-exchanger-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["S-new-heat-exchanger-02"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-water-water-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-pressurised-water-water-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-water-water-02"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-pressurised-water-water-02"].enabled = true
	end
end

"R-new-heat-exchanger-02" is missing.
(Technology.lua includes all 4 and you show them in your screenshot so I'm assuming this is a mistake.)

The new exchangers also seems to want a mix of pressurized and regular water but I've been building my layout with only pressurized water. Which loop (open/closed) are you not pressurizing? Can the new exchangers be done with pressurized water only? (I could DL your example build but I'm lazy and like to figure out/build things myself.)

Your new [planned] buildings intrigue me. I look forward to fiddling with them.

[Fatmice]

A few issues/questions:
Upgrading from 5.2 and I got an error in control.lua on 288, "Attempt to perform arithmetic on field '?' (nil value)".
(Esc closes it; I removed all replaced all reactors and heat exchangers and all seems to be working. (No error on load after this.))

Yes, this error is due to a new array index added to table LReactorandChest. For some reason, some old save will not initialize the new index of all entries in the table. I do not know why. Hitting Esc and break the reactor and its chest and replacing them as you have done should fix the problem.

I used this code to initialize the new index in migration script 0.5.2.lua

Code: Select all

-- Initialize a new row in old reactors
if glob.LReactorAndChest ~= nil then
	for k,LReactorandChest in pairs(glob.LReactorAndChest) do
		if LReactorandChest[5] == nil then
			LReactorandChest[5] = 0
		end
	end
end

Migrations seem to be missing the "Big (R) Exchanger":

Code: Select all

-- Enabled new building and recipes
for index, force in pairs(game.forces) do
	if force.technologies["sulfur-processing"].researched then
		force.recipes["S-new-heat-exchanger-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["R-new-heat-exchanger-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["S-new-heat-exchanger-02"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-water-water-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-pressurised-water-water-01"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-water-water-02"].enabled = true
		force.recipes["heat-exchange-pressurised-water-water-02"].enabled = true
	end
end

"R-new-heat-exchanger-02" is missing.
(Technology.lua includes all 4 and you show them in your screenshot so I'm assuming this is a mistake.)

It is a mistake . Fixed in 0.5.3.1

The new exchangers also seems to want a mix of pressurized and regular water but I've been building my layout with only pressurized water. Which loop (open/closed) are you not pressurizing? Can the new exchangers be done with pressurized water only? (I could DL your example build but I'm lazy and like to figure out/build things myself.)

Your new [planned] buildings intrigue me. I look forward to fiddling with them.

As I understand it, pressurized water is only used in the primary loop that is removing heat from the reactor core. This water is held at ~10.5 MPa (~800 psi). The secondary loop (open loop) is not pressurized to this extend. Of course it is under pressure, but only enough to enter the steam generators, about 200 psi. As such, I reduced the system to pressurized-water/water. However, no harm in having another recipe for pressurized-water/pressurized-water. You should know that using pressurized-water in the secondary loop will cost more upkeep power. I have not tested the pressurized-water/pressurized-water heat exchanged so hopefully it is not OP.

Fix for 0.5.3 will be up shortly.

[Fatmice]

Hello all,

I've incorporated fixes for 0.5.3. New download and release notes here.

[Kane]

This mod looks great. It looks a bit complex but hopfully overtime I will figure it out.

[Fatmice]

This mod looks great. It looks a bit complex but hopfully overtime I will figure it out.

Thanks. Hope you like the mod.

I just tested the current release against 0.11.16, nothing is out of the ordinary and so I expect it to be compatible. Please report if you encounter problems!