What's the recipe for steam from boilers and heat exchangers?

Intermediate fluids like heavy oil have a recipe description in the wiki that looks like this:

heavy oil recipe

but the page for steam does not.

For boilers, what is the exact quantity per unit time of coal consumed and steam generated? The boiler page says:

  • 60 steam per second
  • 8MJ per unit coal * 50% efficiency = 4MJ energy produced per unit coal
  • 30kJ required to heat 1 unit water to steam
  • 3.6MW coal consumption
  • 1.8MW heat power output

By inference,

  • 3.6MJ/s / 8MJ = 0.45 coal/s, i.e. 2.22 s per unit coal
  • 60 steam/s * 2.22 s = 133 steam per output cycle

Is this right?

The page for heat exchangers claims:

  • 10MW heat consumed
  • 103.1 steam/s produced
  • 96.7 kJ per unit steam at 500°C

Could either of these steam conversion rates be phrased as pictorial recipes similar to those of the petrochemical fluids?


Steam is produced in a 1:1 ratio with water at 60 units per second. So the conversion it sounds like you are looking for in the boiler is 60 units of water + 1 second = 60 units of Steam (@165 degrees) This formula has contingencies, however.

If you are looking for the ratio with respect to fuels, then the equation becomes fuel dependent and you are correct from the math of the coal use under full load. Note that the coal usage will scale with power draw. There is a note on this page describing this - Applied power math tutorial. v0.16

Secondly, if you are looking at using the heat exchanger, then there are more changes to the formula because the boiler only goes up to 165 degrees but the heat exchanger reaches 500 degrees.

This is on the wiki for 0.16 Stable Wiki Link and 0.17 Experimental Wiki Link Hope this helps.