Plasma Generator

If you already have knowledge of how a Large Steam/Gas Turbine works, a Large Plasma Turbine is fairly easy to understand.

By now, you should know that the nominal EU output of any Large Turbine is as follows:

Steam: Optimal Steam Flow/2

Superheated Steam: Optimal Steam Flow

Gas: Optimal Steam Flow

Plasma: Optimal Steam Flow * 40

Note that these calculations deal with Optimal Steam Flow, which is completely irrelevant when working with a fusion reactor since it generates plasma, not steam. With a plasma turbine, we only care about Optimal Plasma Flow, which is the rate at which plasma needs to be fed into our Large Plasma Turbine to generate our nominal output EU. We can actually calculate this.

The formula we care about to do this calculation is (Optimal Flow) = (Nominal Output) / (Fuel Value)

Some useful fuel values to note are:

Steam has a fuel value of 0.5 EU/L

Superheated Steam has a fuel value of 1 EU/L

For example, let's say we wanted to get back the Optimal Steam Flow from a Nominal Output of 2400 EU/t. To do this, we simply need to divide our nominal output by the fuel value of regular steam (which is 0.5 EU/L). So we have 2400/0.5 = 4800 L/t = 96000 L/s optimal steam flow.

We can apply the same logic to plasma. First, we need to know the fuel value of the plasma we are using. Let's say we are using Helium Plasma. In GT:NH, 1 cell of Helium Plasma gives 81920000 EU. We want the EU/L fuel value, so we divide by 1000 since 1 cell = 1000L. 81920000/1000 = 81920 EU/L. Now that we have a fuel value, we just need to divide this number from our Nominal Output to get the Optimal Plasma Flow. Let's say we are working with a rotor with 96000 L/s optimal steam flow. The nominal output of this rotor is 96000 * 40 = 3840000 EU/s. Dividing by our fuel value of helium plasma gives 3840000/81920 = 46.875 L/s or 2.34375 L/t optimal plasma flow.

This means that if our Large Plasma Turbine is fed 46.875 Liters of plasma per second, it will generate 3840000 EU/s or 192000 EU/t, before efficiency. It is worth noting that since fluid regulators can only go up or down by a minimum amount of 20 L/s, our example would have to settle with feeding our plasma generator 60 L/s. This is within the 150% more-than-optimal plasma flow that a Large Turbine allows, so we would still generate 192000 EU/t, but we would be wasting some plasma. A better choice of rotor would alleviate this issue.