Switching battery issues

[Occam Blazer]

46 minutes ago, Nikorasu said:

Just curious.. Has the shutoff bug been confirmed to be present in Linux?

Yep, I've been using a switching power grid for a few months now and can confirm it shows up. I mitigated the problem by scanning my batteries on load.

[nakomaru]

Here is a non debug device to trigger the bug 100% of the time.

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, Nikorasu said:

Has the shutoff bug been confirmed to be present in Linux?

I play on LInux. My bug report involves pictures from a Linux machine. 

[bjp]

On 12/30/2020 at 2:32 PM, nakomaru said:

I think I'm gonna use this build. Reliable, quiet, and small.

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Nice, I really like it.  It's not quite as small with heavy watt wire but i'll figure it out.

 

I finally got around to redoing the power supply on some of my plants and now i'm hitting an edge case that i'm struggling with:

 

Say you have the normal solar array with battery bank.  Normally I just put some transformers to dump this onto the "grid" and use consumer flippers.

Spoiler

But what if you also have some hot volcanos producing a lot of extra power far away on the map.  You can dump their power onto the "grid" as well, but what if you want their excess power to charge the battery bank?  The battery bank doesn't pull power from the "grid" so can't charge from them.

 

Have you tried to setup a system like this?  Only thing I can think of is to separate the battery bank into it's own "unit" and hook up 2 flippers, a consumer flipper *and* a producer flipper, but it seems overly complicated and large so I was wondering if anyone thought of a better way.

[nakomaru]

@bjp I don't feed it back to the bank, but directly to the grid. Transformer drain order is done in the order they are built, and heavy transformers deliver 800J increments. If you charge at high percentages, and rebuild your lower priority (solar) transformers, you can drain your turbine transformers more or less before the solar ones. This used to be a lot easier when they could send 4000J increments.

Think about what happens when a battery with 19000J asks for 1000J. The oldest transformer delivers 800J, then the next oldest one gives the remaining 200J, and all others do no work.

Almost same footprint for heaviwatt. I forgot about the protrusion on the bottom. Reverse might be difficult, didn't try.

[bjp]

27 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

@bjp I don't feed it back to the bank, but directly to the grid. Transformer drain order is done in the order they are built, and heavy transformers deliver 800J increments. If you charge at high percentages, and rebuild your lower priority (solar) transformers, you can drain your turbine transformers more or less before the solar ones. This used to be a lot easier when they could send 4000J increments.

Think about what happens when a battery with 19000J asks for 1000J. The oldest transformer delivers 800J, then the next oldest one gives the remaining 200J, and all others do no work.

Almost same footprint for heaviwatt. I forgot about the protrusion on the bottom. Reverse might be difficult, didn't try.

 

I've read about the transistor order, but I was thinking about when the solar bank is low , but the steam turbine is creating surplus power, it's just being thrown into the void when it could be put into that battery buffer :).  It's probably not worth the trouble, though and I'll probably do the same thing you do (feed directly onto the main line).  Also, you don't need a transformer for the steam turbine, right? Just plug the steam turbine port directly into the main line.

 

I did see you post a layout like that before, I just don't like going through the floor when there's 2 empty tiles above you

 

 

[nakomaru]

I tend to put a jumbo with a (large) transformer for isolated steam turbines. It depends on the loads in your base - if you have a lot of constant draw it probably won't matter. In my bases I do see the battery filling up, so I feel this is less wasteful.

Here's an idea. No batteries or transformers up top, nothing on the steam turbines. Those are all connected directly to the main line on cheap wire.

Then in a third location you have this.

Optionally, this can be right next to your fuel powered generators (also directly connected on cheap wire) which will only turn on when the bank is below x%. I'm not sure which batteries take priority when multiple request transformer load. It seems kind of evenly split. My theory is if you have 4 batteries in half of your bank, and 4 switching consumers, half of the work of your transformers is wasted (unless bank is at 100%). Basically you need lots of consumers or lots of transformers or both if you have a big bank. Or you could get fancy with sequential charging/discharging.

I haven't played with it yet but it seems really neat.

[bjp]

54 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

I tend to put a jumbo with a (large) transformer for isolated steam turbines. It depends on the loads in your base - if you have a lot of constant draw it probably won't matter. In my bases I do see the battery filling up, so I feel this is less wasteful.

Here's an idea. No batteries or transformers up top, nothing on the steam turbines. Those are all connected directly to the main line on cheap wire.

Then in a third location you have this.

Optionally, this can be right next to your fuel powered generators (also directly connected on cheap wire) which will only turn on when the bank is below x%. I'm not sure which batteries take priority when multiple request transformer load. It seems kind of evenly split. My theory is if you have 4 batteries in half of your bank, and 4 switching consumers, half of the work of your transformers is wasted. Basically you need lots of consumers or lots of transformers or both if you have a big bank. Or you could get fancy with sequential charging/discharging.

I haven't played with it yet but it seems really neat.

 

Thats sort of the idea i had, but when I built it in debug mode it didn't work very well.  Consumers would drain the battery bank even if there was enough production to meet their needs.  The only way I could get it to work was to build 2 flippers, a consumer one to 'feed' the bank, and a producer one to take power out of the bank when there was high demand.  This is why I don't think it's worth the effort or materials.

 

 

[nakomaru]

Not really sure what you mean. Try the above design with some solar, it should work fine with some consumers and keep them charged. It scales up nicely too. Jumbo batteries are better for this, unfortunately, because you want as few batteries as possible on the bank side. (fewer batteries lets your transformers give higher priority to switches)

One thing I'd like to improve is balancing of the top and bottom because they can get out of sync. Seems difficult.

Also this thing is awful for 20kW consumers. I think you need multiple batteries per switch.

[bjp]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Not really sure what you mean. Try the above design with some solar, it should work fine with some consumers and keep them charged. It scales up nicely too. Jumbo batteries are better for this, unfortunately, because you want as few batteries as possible on the bank side. (fewer batteries lets your transformers give higher priority to switches)

One thing I'd like to improve is balancing of the top and bottom because they can get out of sync. Seems difficult.

Also this thing is awful for 20kW consumers. I think you need multiple batteries per switch.

Mine was a little different:

Spoiler

I had my bank feed directly into transformers so i needed to fill them with a consumer flipper to prevent loopback.  Also I was only feeding them with a 1k transformer, that could have been an issue too... In any case it didnt work.

 

I tried your setup as follows:

Spoiler

8k provider, 6.72k consumer.  it seemed to work fine if I used 2 batteries, but when I extended that to 6 (as in your picture), if I switched off the power supply the consumer browned out before the batteries even started draining.  I guess this is what you meant by your comment on priority.

 

[nakomaru]

Yeah it's really bad for high load consumers, and I can't see a good solution. You could build like 3 small batteries per side of the switch to triple the draw, and add transformers or remove bank batteries, but you are kind of playing a balancing act with all the parts.

By the way I don't think you connected the two tiers of transformers, so they are only giving out half power.

With 3 batteries on each half-bank, one battery on consumer, and 4 transformers you can supply only 4x4kW*1/4=4kW to each battery (3 are the bank). So you would need more transformers or 3 batteries per side of the switch (4x4*3/6=8kW) (small batteries are fine).

Not a very elegant solution in the end because the bank size limits the power capacity.

[bjp]

9 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Yeah it's really bad for high load consumers, and I can't see a good solution. You could build like 3 small batteries per side of the switch to triple the draw, and add transformers or remove bank batteries, but you are kind of playing a balancing act with all the parts.

By the way I don't think you connected the two tiers of transformers, so they are only giving out half power.

With 3 batteries on each half-bank, one battery on consumer, and 4 transformers you can supply only 4x4kW*1/4=4kW to each battery (3 are the bank). So you would need more transformers or 3 batteries per side of the switch (4x4*3/6=8kW) (small batteries are fine).

Not a very elegant solution in the end because the bank size limits the power capacity.

Ah yea good catch.  Still, though, after thinking about it, the problem I'm seeing is that power on the line is split between all charging batteries.  So the more batteries you add the more transformers you need to add, or you'll get less and less power to the consumers and more to charging the batteries. 

I think this issue is what led me to original conclution of: 

consumer flipper -> battery bank -> producer flipper

This way your bank can be any size, only the flipper battery will be on the main line being charged.  I had thought this would be too much extra infrastructure, but after seeing your tower of transformers, maybe not

[nakomaru]

Okay, your idea works!

It's big, but I don't think we can get around the size if you want to be able to deliver 20kW to a station and still be able to charge the bank. Keep in mind this can be anywhere and no transformers or heavi-watt is is necessary on any generators we are using on the grid. With some minor rearrangement this can be built next to your primary fuel source and activated only when the bank is below a certain threshold.

The problem with the interim bank is that it will be rapidly filled by our high capacity transformer array, leaving no room for solar to fill the batteries.

To solve this I put jumbo batteries swapping once per second. In order to fully evacuate these batteries each second we need 10 transformers charging the bank.

With one 20kW consumer, half of our power will go to recharging each jumbo battery, unfortunately, so we need double capacity from our bank, which also means at least 10 transformers.

It seems that generators take priority over transformers when there is capacity left in a battery. When any generator is running, 100% of its wattage will go to increasing the actual deliverable wattage capacity and because we have also evacuated a full jumbo battery each second, there is usually room for solar/steam to fill the bank. (If we have a lot of generation, it may finish charging to 40kJ before the second is over, and any power generated after that will be lost. Generators and transformers act 5 times per second.) I think it might be worth it to have 2 jumbos per side in high generation situations, or as another pair offset by 0.5 seconds, but in practice it charges the bank quite readily.

[take 2]

With concern for reaching the capacity of the interim switch battery before 1 second has elapsed, here is a 4 stage switching battery variant. Each battery is cycled to be charged by the main line for only 0.2 seconds, then for 0.6 seconds it is able to discharge. The idea is to always allow for generators to have capacity to feed into, lowering the activity of the transformers when charging. The rebuilt system uses the full 50kW capacity of both lines. Of course the center two rows of batteries can be expanded to any size.

It seems to be working. Here's the typical output during full solar power (3.04kW)

Here it is with the dev generator on the line, ceding full power.

Here it is with 9.6 kW of hydrogen generators running.

[bjp]

That's excellent.  I've never come close to that kind of capacity, but it's a nice design, creative way to solve the self charging issue.  I'll have to play with it in debug when I get a chance.

Quote

The problem with the interim bank is that it will be rapidly filled by our high capacity transformer array, leaving no room for solar to fill the batteries.

My original idea for solving this was the "transformer flipper" from GH's video.  This is why I had the "-> producer flipper" in the previous post.  You can hook up the extra battery automation signal to a switch on the output of your banks' transformers. This only let power out of your bank if your demand is higher than your production (the flippers batteries are draining), otherwise it's only charging.  It worked well for a small system but I didn't test it for high capacity and I doubt it would scale as well as yours to 20kW consumers.