Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

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zytukin
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Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by zytukin »

My rail based mega base outgrew it's belt based refinery so I made a new larger refinery, which ended up being too small.
Made a 3rd one, which is rail based but unsuccessful. Trains are too small and thus need to travel too often and get in each others way at intersections. It works without deadlocks, but the rail traffic is like a major city during rush hour. So inefficient that it's pretty much useless at a large scale.

Decided to actually put some thought and planing into a 4th refinery after seeing the issues of the previous 3 designs.

Refineries in the center with everything else basically in a ring around the outside. Trains go back and forth between their areas with hardly any intersections between the areas. Trains will be much longer so wont have to travel as often, and very few intersections should yield maximum throughput.


Hoping for 500-1000 beaconed refineries. Wont be able to supply enough oil at first, but it's just a matter of placing and beaconing hundreds more drills.

Red lines and red arrows are rail lines.
Arrows are for product flow direction and the numbers are possible train car length between the areas.
Blue lines are fuel delivery locations.
The "maint" areas are just locations for storing my supply trains while building the massive thing.
del stands for delivery, bringing the item to the refinery
rem stands for removal, removing the item from the refinery
The boxes aren't to scale, it's mostly just for positioning.
poss ref.jpg
poss ref.jpg (202.72 KiB) Viewed 6726 times

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MeduSalem
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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by MeduSalem »

1) Do you really need a 64 car train for delivering the Light Oil from the Heavy-to-Light-Cracking to the Light Oil depot?

2) All while only using a 8 car trains for delivering the Light Oil from the Light Oil depots to Solid Fuel plant and Light-to-Petroleum-Cracking?

I can't help but feel it should be the other way around 8 for 1) and 64 for 2).


But then again I never built such a huge refinery. My demands are still handled by solely using pipes between the stages.

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DaveMcW
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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by DaveMcW »

You can only put about 8 fully beaconed refineries in a row before the oil pipe runs out of pressure. So you should aim for a 16x32 refinery rectangle, or 8x64 if you only want to load oil from one side.

I also recommend putting light oil cracking in every other row of your refinery rectangle. This gives you somewhere to dump the refinery petroleum gas output so everything fits in a double row of beacons.

zytukin
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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by zytukin »

64 car train into the depot and smaller out because the depots are mostly just centers to redistribute between the big and small trains.

64 car trains because the oil train will be 64 cars with 10 refineries per car for 640 refineries. As such the trains removing the lt, hvy, and pg will also be 64 cars to match the blocks of 10 refineries. But will probably double up or quadruple the oil trains. Adjacent stations with the cars unloading into the same blocks. 10 beaconed refineries empty a single rail car pretty fast, big trains take longer to leave a station, and I want them to take a while to unload to lessen this. In the future when 640 is no longer enough, I will just duplicate the entire thing and split the oil delivery trains between them.

The depots are just places to redistribute from the 64 car train to the smaller trains. They will work via priority output splitters. For hvy oil, priority will be lube, all excess will go to cracking to light oil. For lt oil, priority will be solid/rocket fuel and all excess will go to cracking to PG. At the PG depot, priority will be plastics and sulfuric acid and any excess will go to solid/rocket fuel (forgot to put it on the diagram). Might need some tweaking and non priority splitters to adjust the percentages if needed, but will work on that after seeing how it runs.

zytukin
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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by zytukin »

If you are interested, I already have a rail based depot design being used with iron plates and copper plates.

Smelting is done at my ore fields directly into 64 car trains. They deliver these to a redistribution center on the outskirts of my factory so that trains with 4, 8, 16, and 32 cars can take them around inside my factory. The 64 car train on the left moves forward 4 car lengths at a time unloading 16 cars at a time. Dozens of 1-4 trains pick up the plates and move them to the right where they get transferred into the shorter trains to be delivered to various areas inside the factory.

All I need to do is clone it for the various barrelled products and modify it for priority delivery. Could just double the output station and make the products go to one before the other.
iron.jpg
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Aeternus
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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by Aeternus »

Wouldn't it be more efficient to cluster things into parallel units? That way you can simply repeat the pattern and expand the refineries. I've not needed to build a refinery at this kind of scale yet, but I'm having a tough time believing that pumps-and-pipes can't handle the throughput, if you have a few parallel (non braided) pipes. Not sure what all this oil is converted into either at that rate...

Anyway. I'd definately colocate the Light Oil cracking and storage, and Heavy Oil cracking and storage. Both can grow up away from the refinery. Solid fuel and Rocket fuel can also be colocated - once you have Rocket fuel there's really no reason to use Solid fuel anymore. Solidfuel from Light -> Rocketfuel (boosted by production mods) gives bonus energy and can be a parallel production unit. Energy density of rocket fuel is 5 times as high as solid fuel, so using that for huge chemical plants is also handy. A single compressed belt of rocket fuel moves 9 GJ/sec = 9 GW of energy, allowing for a 4.5 GW chemical fuel plant from a single belt.

Plastics I'd isolate and produce elsewhere. You need coal anyway, so moving petrol away from the refinery makes more sense. Same with acid and batteries - that requires metal and some copper.

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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by MisterFister »

I played a mostly-vanilla RSO / Rampant mod on a multiplayer server for a few months in Summer 2017, back when v0.15.30-ish was bleeding-edge beta opt-in. We got the first few dozen rockets launched and were almost done researching the entire tech tree except for the infinite-researches from a light sciencey-type mod we were running. (I have the exact mod list, but I put the game down for work for a few months and have picked back up again in SP on an angelbob setup, so I'd have to spend a lot of time getting my previous train of thought back.)

Anyway, pertinent to this discussion here: It was just me and this one friend, and we were having escalating rail throughput and deadlock issues. We traced the problem to the core design of the rail lines themselves and the base-sizes of our signal blocks. Your smallest regular-signal block (disregarding chain-signals) needs to be LONGER than your single-longest autopiloted train.

Manually piloting a longer train is possible. The magnitude by which it over-extends past the system train-length limit determines the idea number of human passengers aboard. For our purposes, we determined that the core-system could accommodate a 2-8-0 train autopiloted no problem (a side-spur we never got around to retrofitting was servicing a dying set of mines anyway, so we simply segregated that section and only ran shorter trains on it.) We designed a massive trainyard with spare blank-schedule trains ready to be dispatched from mapview (no LongReach) for overflow management, and to more easily allow for new mines and outposts to be brought online quickly as soon as to the interchanges and station platforms were constructed.
We had a handful of supply-trains and builder-trains. Two trains of 2-8-0 length were monoloaded with nothing but landfill for when we were extending out and creating landbridges over ocean crossings -- much preferable due to Rampant and other biter-hostility mods, since they didn't have to be fortified with turrets on a wall-hardened corridor (I think we ended up very near 100% evolution, and an newly-revealed map terrain was essentially one giant super-nest of biters. We had an entire kovarex loop sustaining a full blue-belt of nuke warheads just for manual scouting runs -- one of us would go loaded with an absolutely-full inventory of nukes just to beat back the hordes on the map while the other came behind with bots to clear debris and begin laying the walls and turrets to extend outward. Very tedious, but oddly relaxing.)

Anyway, two trains were loaded for building rail corridors, four trains designed for extending defensible outposts around discovered resource patches. Three trains designed for doing nothing but laying miners and loading stations -- we preferred belt-loading over bot-loading. Anyway, the longest of these super-length trains were 3-20-0 in length. Because that length was so much longer than the system could handle, one had to manually drive the train while the other rode along to supervise in mapview to call out interchanges, to access and manually pause trains to keep traffic clear (especially since sometimes we had to proceed down the wrong direction of a one-way track to get to an outpost still in progress if the rail wasn't completely laid from the last train) and sometimes that second pilot would have to exit mapview, disembark the train, and hop into a nearby deadlocked train to reverse it out to clear deadlocks.

Trains that were only 1-5 cars overlength for the system could be handled by a single driver.
We never had much incentive to use variable-length trains, as we preferred to use the same form-factor trains to haul everything for simplicity of designing the transfer platforms. We did discuss certain short-range 1-2-0 trains for purposes of seeding fuel for locomotives and stuff like that, but never really got out far enough on the map were more than 50% of a locomotive's onboard fuel supply was needed for the outbound leg, so we were still relying on dropoff-only fuel locations.

tldr; In your thumbnail sketch here, I anticipate significant problems if your super-length trains end up traversing the rest of your larger rail network if that network isn't massively overhauled to accommodate trains of that length in any single signal block. Note that this requires massive redesign of your interchanges and intersections, especially if you run 4-track or 4+-track systems.

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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by MisterFister »

zytukin wrote:My rail based mega base outgrew it's belt based refinery so I made a new larger refinery, which ended up being too small.
Made a 3rd one, which is rail based but unsuccessful. Trains are too small and thus need to travel too often and get in each others way at intersections. It works without deadlocks, but the rail traffic is like a major city during rush hour. So inefficient that it's pretty much useless at a large scale.

Decided to actually put some thought and planing into a 4th refinery after seeing the issues of the previous 3 designs.

Refineries in the center with everything else basically in a ring around the outside. Trains go back and forth between their areas with hardly any intersections between the areas. Trains will be much longer so wont have to travel as often, and very few intersections should yield maximum throughput.


Hoping for 500-1000 beaconed refineries. Wont be able to supply enough oil at first, but it's just a matter of placing and beaconing hundreds more drills.

Red lines and red arrows are rail lines.
Arrows are for product flow direction and the numbers are possible train car length between the areas.
Blue lines are fuel delivery locations.
The "maint" areas are just locations for storing my supply trains while building the massive thing.
del stands for delivery, bringing the item to the refinery
rem stands for removal, removing the item from the refinery
The boxes aren't to scale, it's mostly just for positioning.
poss ref.jpg
I'm curious if you've made any progress on this. Would you be willing to post your savefile? I'd be happy to tinker inside of it to see if I can develop any better answers for you.

Aeternus
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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by Aeternus »

I'm curious what the indended use for all these refineries is - fueling or petroleum. You could split your refinery up in 2 units splitting them for this task. On the petroleum refinery, siphon some heavy oil away for lube production as neccesary, then crack the rest including all light oil to petroleium. Dealing with only one product reduces the infrastructure complexity, and should cut down on the rush hour menace.

On the fuel plant, crack heavy to light, then use both light and petrol for fuel production. Oil (and water) in, rocket fuel out. Also fairly simple logistics wise.

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Re: Thoughts on possible large scale refinery layout?

Post by mrvn »

I'm too think you should build more modular subunits. At this scale you aren't going to suddenly switch all heavy oil cracking off and use the heavy oil for something else. Instead you will have a constant stream of crude oil being refined, heavy oil cracked to light, light oil cracked to butane and then you export butane for some other use.

So why not have a subunit in the 5:1:7 ratio that takes crude oil and outputs butane and all the cracking is done internally with pipes.

Another thing I've realized is that it doesn't make sense to use up material from a train at the highest speed possible. That just means you are racing to get more trains per minute to the train stop and any slight delay means the buffer runs dry. Scale down your factory, use less refineries per train stop and then duplicate the whole thing. Now you have trains going to 2 different stops at half the trains per minute each. They have more space not to get in each others way and if one train is delayed by a few seconds the buffer tanks won't have run dry yet.

Instead of one 64 car train stop I would use 8x 8 car train stops in parallel. Give them plenty of extra track for breaking before the stop and accelerating after the stop before joining them into a single track. The track can carry a lot more trains if they split before breaking and merge after acceleration.

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