A 6:84:60 steam powerplant (mainly) just for fun

[BlakeMW]

I was interested to see how many boilers and steam engines I could join together on a single water network and have it work at 100%, apparently there is no real limit as long as you provide enough parallel paths for the water to go and ensure that the water from each offshore pump goes through 14 boilers.

[DaveMcW]

Do you get the full 30.6 MW? It looks like the right side is bottlenecked on hot water.

[BlakeMW]

Do you get the full 30.6 MW? It looks like the right side is bottlenecked on hot water.

The power plant is linked to a radar array which completely maxes it out, you can see all 84 boilers are indeed operating - I don't think it's even possible for the boilers to all be operating and the steam engines not as if some steam engines aren't consuming liquid the flow rate through the boilers would be reduced, but in any case all steam engines are indeed operating at full performance and the production is 30.6MW.

Now as for why it's not bottlenecked - the bottom two boiler strings run the middle steam engines, the middle two boiler strings run the right engines, and the top two boiler strings run the left engines - more or less. The fluid simulation is good enough to let the water find a way.

There's a variant I want to post: Those with delicate sensibilities around fluid dynamic theories may want to avert their eyes :



Once again under full sustained load we have all boilers operating at nominal capacity, it does take about 30s for the fluid simulation to stabilize but once it does it produces the full 30.6MW. As can be seen, parallel pipes actually work completely fine, there's another guy who has posted some things about this. If the pipes have enough capacity, the fluid simulation will find a way. The only thing which will make it not work is to give the water from the offshore pumps multiple possible paths through the boilers, if you joined the output from the offshore pumps together, most the water go through one or two of the boiler strings, bypassing the other strings almost altogether, avoid that one caveat and you can have fun with monstrously parallel pipeage.

[Kewlhotrod]

its not worth the inconsistency the build like that

[BlakeMW]

It's obviously not a serious design - but I think in future I'll be exploiting parallel pipes for steam setups with 40 or 50 steam engines, it only starts to look silly with 60 or 70 steam engines.

[Fatmice]

If you want less delay you should have the steam engines below the boilers.