Clarification of fluid mechanics

[Horus773]

I’ve been playing with mods recently, namely industrial revolution, and it adds a lot of new fluid to the game. Especially recipe that creates water.

I noticed that my pipes systems are regularly blocked with « fluid overflow » or empty. Never in the middle, like a balanced network.

I’ve been testing different configurations with pumps and reservoir but I can’t seem to get it right.

Is there a post with design details on how to do this properly? I went to the wiki but it’s pretty light.

My dilemna is mainly the following:

1) if your pipe system generates more than it consume, it will eventually be full and your production building with stop because of fluid overflow

2) if your pipe system consume more than is produced, all is good for production building but on the consummer end, it will always be waiting for fluid input.

How do you get it to balance out (say 50%) using pump and reservoir?

I know the obvious answer is to ensure that the production equal the consumption side, but that never happens in my games since I am always upgrading a part of the factory, hence generating an unbalanced system

This is important since I want both the production and consumption building to work at all time, not be blocked at either end of the pipe network.

[Frightning]

Sounds like you would have the same problem as with vanilla Advanced oil processing and backlogging (aka back-pressure) due to too much Heavy oil/Light oil. The solution is more or less the same. A little bit a circuit network controls to shut-off/activate production so as to avoid backlogging. I use the circuit network to control when cracking of HO to LO and LO to PG are to be done.

[mmmPI]

If you upgrade your factory and end up with temporary imbalance, then you don't have much choice, some machine will not be running continuously, either being full, or not receiving input.

You can store some fluids in tanks to prevent the overflow and have a reserve to prevent starving machine this would act as a delay mechanism that hopefully for you can handle the variation.

The other part of the system is using pumps, and circuit network.

Connecting a wire to tank allow you to read its content, and you can toggle pumps on/off depending on the tank's content.

This could allow you to set priority on where the fluids are supposed to go. For example, 2 tank connected to 3 pumps are keeping water, one pump can be set to open when water>10 K, another one when water >40K and the last one when water >45K.

It is easier to manage priority when not enough liquid is availble rather than deal with excess liquid when you don't have receipe/technology to use them.

To avoid the overflow, you could use pumps after a chemical plant producing lubricant for example. Chemplant => pump => tank. The pump can read the tank content, and only let lube flows in when the tank is <10K. This means the chemplant would be overflowing on purpose but the liquid would stay confined at the chemplant, locked behind the pump waiting for the tank to empty under 10K. ( allowing you to dump lubricant from other place in that tank, and it would be used before the lube produced by the chemplant which would only kicks in , in case of emergency).

This means some machines are stopped, which is inevitable if the ratios are not 100% correct, i would say the important part is to create a mechanism that allow you to control which machines are stopped and when, in order to fulfil your need and not clog the plumber thing.

[Honktown]

The others have said more specific things, but quite succinctly, if things are not in exact 1:1 ratio, including some in-between stuff that effects input/output, there will ALWAYS be an excess or need. An example is copper cables and green chips: the normal ratio is 3:2 (6 wires produced in .5 seconds, six wires consumed, allowing direct machine-machine insertion without downtime). You throw 4 productivity 3 modules in there, and now the wires produce 2 * 1.4 on average per cycle, while the green circuits are only consuming 3. The smallest assembler integer ratio of 2.8:3 is 15:14. People have made 29 assembler long beaconed set-ups to demonstrate that the math checks out, and 15 beaconed green chip machines with 14 copper wire producers in-between feeding left to right (GWGWGW...G) eventually stabilizes at full machine operation. Fluids are all over the place, because the pipes can flow at 1200 units/s, and machines are very rarely in perfect ratios, because there's always multiple steps (refinery with three different oil->output ratio recipes, crackers with or without modules, chem plant A doing X, chem-plant/assembler B taking chem plant A's output for Y, assembler C making Z from 1 to however-many ingredients, etc). Red chips were and still are the worst nightmare: they take two green chips, but then blue chips take 20 green and 2 red, obliterating the green/red chips and requiring faster belts to keep running. The worst part is green chips produce in .5 seconds, blue chips take 20, and red takes 6. 20 green chips can be produced in exactly 20 seconds. Two red chips take 12 seconds, and consume another 4 green chips total. 12:20 and 2:6 make for a terrible time trying to evenly ratio (overlapping green chip machines? completely separate? who knows!). Worse, because blue chips take 20 green chips per cycle, you add a few blue chip machines, and now your red supply is jack shit because you just took TWENTY green chips that could've made 10 red chips AND ate two red chips, consuming 12/20 of what the red chip machines produce.

[Ranger_Aurelien]

Sounds like you would have the same problem as with vanilla Advanced oil processing and backlogging (aka back-pressure) due to too much Heavy oil/Light oil. The solution is more or less the same. A little bit a circuit network controls to shut-off/activate production so as to avoid backlogging. I use the circuit network to control when cracking of HO to LO and LO to PG are to be done.

I do this automatically using only pumps (no circuit network).


For example:
Refinery (Heavy oil output)
||
||== (Convert whatever is not pumped south to Light Oil, pipe this to LightOil output of refinery)
||
PUMP \/
||
(Priority Heavy oil use)

Repeat for Light Oil to Petroleum Gas. In my worlds, my systems seems to take in as much plastic as I can throw in...

[Impatient]

these are the basics about fluids:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system

and also, to calculate the correct ratios and the needed throughput, you can use:

helmod (for everything including any mod combination, though a bit unintuitive): https://mods.factorio.com/query/helmod?version=0.17

kirk mcdonalds factorio calculator (for vanilla and IR only):
https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm ... ne-furnace

throughput for fluids also depends on the distance. revisit:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system#Pipelines


for througput issues (belts and inserters) refer to:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Inserters#Inserter_Throughput
https://wiki.factorio.com/Belt_transpor ... r_overview

As to your specific question, the only answer is buffers. In case of the fluid system this would be storage tanks. The factory does not know when you are upgrading.