Medium sized balanced furnaces project

[giustizieri25]

Balanced smelting setup project based on transport belts

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This setup currently contains 120 smelters and is expandable horizontally and vertically.
Horizontally means you can add new “lanes” (highlighted in colors), vertically means you can make “lanes” longer.
Each lane consists of a 2 stacks of furnaces organized in basic modules of 4.

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The base module is composed of 4 furnaces, with 2 input chests and shared output chests. Input ore flows onto a blue belt from top to bottom, while output product flows from left to right onto a red belt (eventually they merge onto blue belts and delivered to train station)

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Output lanes merger.

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Sorry for night picture. Input ore distribution across the 5 major lanes happens in a cycle. 2 train unloading stations dump ores from the two sides of the blue belts circle so that ore is constantly re-distributed to where needed.

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All chests in the same lane are wired up together to an arithmetic combinator. The sum of all the ores is divided by how many chests there are in the lane (12 in my case) so to have the average, of how much each chest should equally contain.

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Loading inserters are activated when the local chest contains less than the average. In the long run all the chests in a lane will contain the same amount of ores.

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The grand total amount of ores is the divided by another calculator by the number of lanes that you have (5 in my case) to tell which lane should be fed by the input distribution circle.

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This other small combinatory setup decides if a lane is open for input (if the amount of ores in the lane is less than the global average)

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If you manage to have a consistent supply of ores, in the long run these techniques makes sure all the furnaces will run at the same time, by accumulating a buffer of ores equally distributed across all the input chests. No more chests and furnaces overloaded at one side and other empty and waiting for supply at the other side.

[herkalurk]

Do you have a blueprint string to share?

[dood]

You need a couple more smelters to fully compress the belt, it's 72 for a blue one.