How many heat exchangers per pipeline

[varundevan]

Hi,

This topic might be discussed earlier , but I could not find an exact solution i need.
i see that fluid behaves weird in certain situations.

In the below, you can see the the reactor design i was trying, but i find that the steam is not reaching to the right and left extremes. At the same time , i also noticed that the steam is not completely delivered from the heat exchanger.

PS , I am trying to design a 32 reactor , number of heat exchangers is 496 (248 per side), number of turbines is 852 (426 per side) . I hope the ratios are correct.

what is the problem ....
thanks in advance for your answers.

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[astroshak]

2x16 = 32.

2x16 Reactors produce 4x120+28x160=4960 MW.

4960 MW / 10 MW/Heat Exchanger = 496 HE’s, or 248/side as your math indicated.

4960 MW / 5.82 MW/Turbine = 852.23 Turbines, rounding up since its impossible to put a fraction of an entity down. Call it 853. 427 per side.

While it looks like you have exactly that, it still looks like you are having a problem. How long are you waiting for the reactors to stabilize out? It may take a while for the last Heat Exchangers to get enough heat. Another issue might be water supply. Heat Exchangers consume 103 water/sec. Offshore Pumps only put out enough water (1200 water/sec) to feed 11.something HE’s running full bore, not quite enough to supply 120 MW of steam (only about 97% of the water needed for 120 MW of steam). If you are not producing enough steam due to water, that would explain the turbines being idle.

Another issue could be bottlenecking in the steam pipes. I’d suggest determining how many turbines that one row of your heat exchangers can supply with steam, and only feed that many turbines (rounding up, of course) and no others. Keep the steam lines separate rather than all interconnected.

EDIT - you have most HE columns 10 HE long. They put out 103 steam each, or 1030 steam in total. So, each such column can feed 17.17 turbines. Put 18 turbines onto each of those HE columns, but do not try to feed more turbines than just those 18 per HE column.

[varundevan]

Thank you for the time and reply astroshak.

The water is sufficient, verified it.
looks like the problem is the pipe cannot get out the steam of 10HEs,. Interconnecting is causing pressure distributions issues, the fluid mechanics inn factorion un intuitive even adding pumps is not working
may be separating the turbines instead of interconnecting is a good idea let me try and post the outcome.

EDIT - it worked, Thanks you for the calculation and suggestion.

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[varundevan]

actually, i observed that, a straight pipe line cannot accommodate more than 14 HE without bottle necking the steam output, what is that ..
how that calculation works , any idea .. ?

[disentius]

14 HE's -> 14*103 steam/sec = 1442 steam/sec.
If you look at the table on the wiki, you can see how many pipe segments there can be without pumps to sustain this flow.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system#Flow

[astroshak]

Yea and no, you can always include pumps into the design provided you find space to power them.