|
Post by Fgdfgfthgr on Sept 15, 2017 4:05:05 GMT
Use the outlet heat from the last thermocouple as the inlet of another thermocouple. Repeating that and so on. This might increase the overall efficiency by the cost of final outlet temp to the radiators. The reason I made this thought is that different temp has different suitable thermocouple materials... If the nuclear fuels become extremely expensive, will this work better than simply increase the temp range of single thermocouple?
|
|
|
Post by n2maniac on Sept 15, 2017 6:17:21 GMT
Use the outlet heat from the last thermocouple as the inlet of another thermocouple. Repeating that and so on. This might increase the overall efficiency by the cost of final outlet temp to the radiators. The reason I made this thought is that different temp has different suitable thermocouple materials... If the nuclear fuels become extremely expensive, will this work better than simply increase the temp range of single thermocouple? In real life, yes, this is a thing that is done to handle higher temperature deltas on peltier coolers, though not common on thermoelectric generators that I have seen. Yea, different thermoelectrics have different effectivenesses at different temperatures. Ingame, the thermocouples are unrealistically efficient (they approach carnot efficiencies!) and won't really change much between reasonable choices. Expanding the Thot-Tcold, there will be a small benefit. By the time you get to an exhaust temperature about 3/4 of the hot side temperature, you have minimized the radiator area per unit of electric power produced and further Tcold decreases will actually start increasing radiator area. If you want to get a sense of it just modify your thermocouple materials to not break across 4000K+ temperature delta. Easiest way is cut tungsten and osmium's moduli by a straight factor of 10, fire up the game, and use any exhaust temperature you want. File should be somewhere around here, probably Elements.txt (on Windows): C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Children of a Dead Earth\Resources\Data If you find anything interesting modding it, please post it!
|
|
|
Post by apophys on Sept 15, 2017 20:35:34 GMT
By the time you get to an exhaust temperature about 3/4 of the hot side temperature, you have minimized the radiator area per unit of electric power produced and further Tcold decreases will actually start increasing radiator area. If we get LDRs or encapsulated liquid radiators, radiator mass will be less of a factor, so increasing its area won't be as much of a concern.
|
|