Tips regarding oil balancing

[LittleMiiMe]

Hey there

I'm currently planning to build a single mega oil refinery to supply multiple separate bases and I am looking for tips to balance and speed up the transfer of oil between machines. I never really got the hang of it, every oil refinery I built works but there have been some issues:
- Refined oils keep getting backed up in tanks while the pump is only pumping at 1k/12k and there is plenty of capacity at the destination
- When feeding multiple tanks into a single pipe with pumps, there is an unbalanced amount between tanks (one tank full while the other is empty)
- Pipes never seem to be full and seem to favour one machine in a series at times

To give you an idea on the sizes I am working with, my normal refinery areas have about 100 refineries running while this planned new refinery will have 2.3k of refineries and 4.5k of chemical plants just for conversions to petroleum gas.

Thank you for helping me

[Sklecs]

Big factory requires big logic.
How I see the solution to the problem:
1) You can connect a pump to each machine and a barrel to the pump. And set the logic for the pump. When all barrels have the same amount of oil, then the pump turns on. With this method, you will get a full and even distribution of oil over the machines. They will work at the same time and spend oil at the same time.
2) Also use barrels and pumps. You make a chain: pump - barrel - pump - barrel - .... as much as you want. And set the logic for the pumps: Work until the barrel after it has an equal amount of oil with the barrel that stands before the pump.

If I think of anything else *funny* I'll update the post.

[Tertius]

Thoughts about fluid handling:

• throughput above about 1200/s is tricky. The maximum length without intermediate pumps becomes very short if you go above.
• try to avoid splitting and merging pipes if used with high throughput as 1200/s and above. The engine isn't able to merge or split fluid streams equally - Usually, one input or output is preferred over the other, and this becomes very visible with high throughput. For low throughput, it doesn't matter.
• use multiple parallel pipes with lower throughput instead of 1 single pipe with boosted high throughput. You need to split and merge much less, thus avoid the above issues.
• It's possible to merge multiple low throughput inputs pipes into one high throughput pipe, if there is a pump immediately after the merging pipe piece, but don't split this pipe again. It might be necessary to also use pumps on all input pipes directly before the merging pipe pieces to avoid backflow into pipes with lower fluid level. These pumps are more a valve than a pump.
• tanks as buffers are tricky, if there is constant high flow into them and out of them at the same time. They are filled and emptied at the same time, so their maximum level is the lower the higher the intended throughput.
• design your production lines so that an excess of oil is cracked and fed back to the corresponding higher level oil pipes. This way no intermediate oil is backed up. The circuit network can help to balance this, so not too much is cracked but excess is cracked. Use tanks to measure fluid level and activate/deactivate pumps that feed the machines that do cracking.
• It's easier to organize, if you design production lines that start with crude oil and focus on one single output product and are self contained, for example a line that exclusively produces plastic bars or that exclusively produce rocket fuel. Input crude oil, black box inside, output plastic bars. That minimizes handling different intermediates outside of the black boxes, for example you don't need to cope with the high throughput petroleum gas on a larger scale.