ElectricalAge
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Electrical-Age
Voltage Losses on relative short distances
Maybe this is not completely classified as an issue but I regard it as one. I have noticed that either Transmission or Distribution lines as 59 kV and 14.8 kV respectively tend to lose a lot of voltage even at short distances if they carry quite some current, so for example the 14.8 line carries 70 kW in lets say 1/2KM distance, the voltage in the line at the end will drop to 14.3 -14.2 which I consider is a lot of voltage loss for little distance, compare that to a line of that voltage in real life at that distance it will suffer no losses at all, also transmission line at 59 kV at the start carrying 100 kW which is 1/4 of its capacity, in a 1 KM distance (1000 Meters) or 1000 minecraft blocks, will lose quite some voltage to carry that current to where it has to go, the receiving station will receive 58.4 or 58.3 kV, might not seem like alot but for me its quite alot because I want the voltage to be where I want it to be and not lost in that short distance, considering transmission lines are made to eliminate losses over distances, for example at cable voltage that means 3.71 kV and receiving will be 3.65 kV, yet again might not seem like a lot but I consider it alot because when going into distribution further voltage is lost and I am left with a line at 3.59 kV or 14.4 kV, which is not what I planned for, any idea as to why these enormous voltage losses at short distance? What could I do to eliminate this problem?
I know cables have resistance and also in real life, but I wanted to know why the enormous losses.
I think this is just based on what the developers felt like a reasonable amount of power utilization. TBH, the T2 poles are still in development and not something that are in any final state.
The amount that the voltage drops per meter is probably something that ca be configured either by editing the code, or some kind of constant in the configuration file. I'll get back to you on that.
cableRsFactor in the configuration file under the simulation category may do something to affect this. I would first try setting it somewhere around 0.5 and see what that does.
Make a backup of your world. It's pretty internal to the MNA.
Thanks for the heads up, I will try it out, of course I was breaking my head trying to figure out how to keep voltage stable but what does that configuration affect? Resistance of all cables from low voltage to transmission wire? Thanks Jared!!
Jared, do you have any idea what any of these mean, I am interested in really knowing what all that means, for example the captial D the Capital I and the rest, really interested in playing with some of them, any information will be cool, thanks!! simulation { D:cableRsFactor=1.0 I:electricalFrequency=20 I:electricalInterSystemOverSampling=50 I:thermalFrequency=400
Update: Changing that worked!! Thanks Jared!! Setting to 0.5 reduced the voltage drop from 3.72 to 3.69 not to 3.65 where it was before, I assume any lower will mean eliminating resistance
CableRsFactor multiplies cable resistances. Set it lower to make cables lose less energy, or higher if you want cables to block power better. ElectricalFrequency is an engine variable. You can turn it down if ELN causes too much lag, but it will make the system process slower. Defaults to 20 because minecraft is also at 20hz Oversampling is an optional overclocking for the engine which is used when combining two separate ELN networks together. It's set to a little over double to give the system plenty of time to calculate. Thermal Frequency is how often the engine will update on heat blocks. Changing this tends to cause instability, so just leave it alone, but you can turn it down in the same fashion as electrical to help with lag issues. Shouldn't b a problem, so don't touch it.
EDIT: As I just discovered, decreasing the resistance also make wires more capable of transmitting amps, since heating is based on power lost, not current.
D means double number expected (a number with a decimal point). I means integer expected (a number without a decimal point).
There are limits to the precision/size of the variables, but I can't recall exactly.
You can set it to 0, which presumably will disable it, or 2, which will create even more loss.
Due to the way the current affects temperature, this may affect cable temperature and the current you can push over a cable.
I would probably avoid changing the other numbers. It may cause some bad things to happen that you don't expect. Make backups.
Edit: Omega beat me to it
You can set it to 0, which presumably will disable it
Funny you mention that.
#882
Ha ha nice try, it's an easy enough bug to fix. EDIT: I did try it and yes it works. The Solver only cares if the resistance is 0 since it can't solve what the voltage should be if there's two different voltages connected with no resistance.
Thanks for the comments, I appreciate it and love playing with the mod since I want to make it close to real life for now I set it to .5 and should be good unless I get more power hungry on a 1 megawatt system so I would lower it but never set to 0 since I want some resistance to it then also the solver can't calculate certain things without resistance
So maybe if you put the resistance to.00001 you can essentially pass like 40 amps through a 200v wire which was designed to take 10 amps max that's what you're saying? Also do you guys know what ratio or atleast at was rs factor it needs to be to simulate real life resistance? Like the resistance factor in ELN is way higher than that of real life per meter so any idea what ratio the resistance is to that of real life like: ELN:RL?
I have no idea what the ideal value would be. Minecraft does not exactly translate very well to real life due to technical constraints with the simulation, as well as the time scale and the scale of distances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge
Apparently a value of 0.1608 milliOhms per meter (block) is a realistic value using the highest AWG which fits ELN's cables pretty well. The canonical resistance of low voltage cables appears to be 12 AWG with its 20A limit and 5 milliOhm/m resistance.
Therefore at what factor should I put the RSFactor to get the ideal resistance per block? Or is that the resistance that comes stock with the game at a factor of 1? I tested with the .1 and I had a mysterious short circuit within a transformer, if supplied with voltage it would take in an instant 41 kiloamps and then it would cause enormous voltage surge in an instant unless the line breaker shutoff then the voltage will drop to 0 instantly which is not the correct behavior for some reason it had a void of electricity but I fixed it my replacing the transformer, as to why I have no idea.
I also noticed that for any value below .1 or so everything will bug out, id say below .05 it will go nuts, all the generators will blow up, many transformers and transformer poles will explode, or any wire essentially, its just a mess, currently testing for optimal resitance, found out for now .1 will be stable for my 1 MW system
Low resistances will cause high inrush currents. Use some standard resistors or inductors to help survive those massive inrushes.
For that, well I will basically have to rebuild the electrical grid which will take days to replace that but I rather live with .1 RS factor it servers justice but on the other hand I been getting many bugs, for some reason some transformers are now glitched and have an electrical void that wont let distribution lines be upped unless replacing the transformer which in this case solves the problem but I also have a mayor problem with high voltage cables, I have three sources on three different breakers but they all go to rheostats to produce heat and burn 4 kW each when I pull the switch to close the circuit for some reason it creates a massive IMAGINARY IMAGINARY IMAGINARY!!!! Short Circuit which blows up everything in its path and also the distribution lines, any idea as to why these bugs? I will drop a picture of the setup
While am at it, I currently use the T2 Dev Version of ELN, is there any other dev releases that have come after this one so I can test it on the server?
Well I was wondering if there are any other dev releases because if you want to compile ELN your self the rar weights around 22 MB while the compiled jar weights around 18 MB so that's why I am wondering if there is any small fixes done to the T2 DEV version
I threw that file together that you are using now a few months back. While there is no new developments on the mod for 1.7.10, I do have a fork where I am making some quality of life fixes and other things. Everyone here otherwise is making the push for 1.10 and beyond rather than doing any more 1.7.10 work (1.10 and beyond is much needed to be honest)
Yea I remember when you threw me that back in December, I really got into ELN by then and built massive things and want to continue to expand, but I saw some new items that are planned and wanted to know if there is any fork out there with them items that I saw in the uncompiled version, well if you fork any other versions with any new things I would like to test it out, because I really have put to the test this mod and I love it and would love to see future changes to ELN and the very needed update to 1.10 but I can wait for that (as long as I am busy trying not to get things to explode on a 1MW grid and inventing new circuits) Cheers!
http://eln.ja13.org
Any bugs on that fork go to https://github.com/jrddunbr/ElectricalAge and not here. Totally not the most stable software, btw. Stuff there will be merged back here, where appropriate, and when I can find the time.
Hey I would like to know why tf is this mod exploding everything like it just can, I'm pissed 100% that I have wasted 8 hours on the game trying to make improvements and basically had to replace bunch of shit because it all exploded because it can, first generators just blow up because they can not that I am doing anything wrong and then the game has a bunch of short circuits everywhere where there is no current flow, I tried energizing a line that had no power consumption no breakers on all off but somehow the stupid unrealistic peace of shit managed to create a short circuit somewhere impossible and then pull 20 kilo amps yea KILO and blew up the line with a staggering temperature of 22 kilo celcius and no humane way possible does any object especially a power grid reach such temperatures and also blowing up the Transmission Center along with tranny lines, any idea as to why the erratically nonsense bull shit and just to point out it has been a recurring issues for more than 6 months now but these invisible short circuits that blow up everything are possing me off and also diodes don't work those pleases of shit ain't working like they should that current flows one way but no if I open the breaker of a generator so when voltage rises it produces power somehow the stupid diode lets Current through for a second causing a massive surge of power blowing everything up even the generators WTF is actually going on, any ideas as to why all this bullshit?? Sry for this rant btw it's just a lot of issue making me pissed, Thanks for the help!!
Changing the above values no doubt changes the gameplay negatively because it has been completely untested. If you can corner these odd problems, try submitting a bug report.
In general, there are still many bugs that need working out. We are certainly trying to smoosh them, but they are not very easy to find. I also personally do not have the time these days to do much of anything besides classwork, but drilling down to the core of the problem can help bugfixes.
To sum up the problem I am having or bugs let's say is, when resistance is lowered it helps and works fine but generators when put to ground to dump power in case of emergency they blow up idk why but they do and before the resistance they didn't, second diodes are letting for a brief second current go through them and that happened before lowering the resistance but they let for a brief moment current go through which causes everything to blow up because of the surge in power and finally long distance cables with no load just create short circuits within the cable that explode everything, this final one really impresses me, the rest is workable really, but haven't the developers thought of adding better breakers for letting different types of current go through? On a 1000 kW system a 16 kW breaker is useless because you would need a lot of them to power the system so using a PLC with relay works best but I would like to see a real breaker for these higher voltages, and on a side note why are breakers useless when a short circuit happens? The breaker trips but the line explode because temp reaches like 300'C isn't the breaker supposed to prevent this from happening? Even the stable version has this problem, thanks Jared for the help, I understand college work is hard and takes time, I also take college classes so, best of luck my friend!!