5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

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Avezo
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5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by Avezo »

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One of my favourite designs so far, I'm very happy how compact it ended up being.
- 5:1:7 Cracking ratio with additional lubricant plant
- Small enough that I didn't notice problems with pipe throughput
- Smart pumps to control cracking
- Tanks for measurements for smart pumps
- BP string for build without creative mods entities

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Deadly-Bagel
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Re: 5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by Deadly-Bagel »

I particularly like how rather than trying to manage the flow from the many outputs of the Refineries to the many inputs of the cracking Chem Plants, you've instead put pumps on the water pipes to the Chem Plants. I never thought of doing it this way, there will be some margin of error as the excess water in the pipes is consumed but not a great deal.
Money might be the root of all evil, but ignorance is the heart.

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Re: 5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by Aeternus »

Have you stresstested this design to determine the max flow rate? Looks like a bit of a power hog with that amount of beacons... bit excessive but it should definately be fast.

[Edit] I cut off water as well on my own refineries. It prevents a lot of "sputtering" where the pump activates when a level is reached, blasts 1000 liquid into the pipes/factories and immediately is deactivated again since the level falls. You could solve it with a level based latch, but this works fine too. There's not a whole lot of water in the pipes. A third option and the path least traveled is to use a power switch and cut power to the chemplants entirely.

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Re: 5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by BlakeMW »

Deadly-Bagel wrote:I particularly like how rather than trying to manage the flow from the many outputs of the Refineries to the many inputs of the cracking Chem Plants, you've instead put pumps on the water pipes to the Chem Plants. I never thought of doing it this way, there will be some margin of error as the excess water in the pipes is consumed but not a great deal.
I've been doing this forever. Occasionally I block the output instead if it's a more convenient location for a pump than the inputs.

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MeduSalem
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Re: 5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by MeduSalem »

BlakeMW wrote:
Deadly-Bagel wrote:I particularly like how rather than trying to manage the flow from the many outputs of the Refineries to the many inputs of the cracking Chem Plants, you've instead put pumps on the water pipes to the Chem Plants. I never thought of doing it this way, there will be some margin of error as the excess water in the pipes is consumed but not a great deal.
I've been doing this forever. Occasionally I block the output instead if it's a more convenient location for a pump than the inputs.
I am doing it differently altogether.

Instead of controlling pumps I use power switches.

Had the idea when I started to beaconize the Refineries, the Heavy-to-Light and the Light-to-Petroleum cracking.

I wanted to be able to turn off the beacons seperately when one of the stages is currently not in use to save on power. So I hooked up the power switches to an array of combinators which in turn are hooked to the tanks and turn on/off if certain conditions are met.
  • Refining crude Oil is only done if there is water & crude oil available AND as long as Heavy & Light & Petroleum are each below 4/5 the tank capacity. (If one of the 3 would go beyond the threshold it would eventually render the refinery stuck, so time to shut down the refineries/beacons)
  • Light-to-Petroleum cracking is only done if water AND Light Oil is above 4/5 the tank capacity AND Petroleum tank capacity is not reached.
  • Heavy-to-Light oil cracking is only done if water AND Heavy Oil is above 4/5 the tank capacity AND light oil tank capacity is not reached.
So not only I get to control the beacons but I also could manage the fluid flow with that... two problems solved with one solution.

I only use unconditional pumps to ensure that the inputs are always filled and that the output is empty when the stage starts so that there's no time wasted waiting on input or output.

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Re: 5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by Aeternus »

Sadly, cutting power creates a separate power grid, which is not UPS friendly. Okay for small factories, but not so much for bigger plants.

As for shutting your refineries when light/heavy storage is topping out - If that happens in my plant I shunt some of it to solidfuel/rocketfuel production. As long as you got enough heavy to light conversion capacity, you shouldn't have too much of an issue.

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impetus maximus
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Re: 5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by impetus maximus »

Aeternus wrote:Have you stresstested this design to determine the max flow rate? Looks like a bit of a power hog with that amount of beacons... bit excessive but it should definately be fast.

[Edit] I cut off water as well on my own refineries. It prevents a lot of "sputtering" where the pump activates when a level is reached, blasts 1000 liquid into the pipes/factories and immediately is deactivated again since the level falls. You could solve it with a level based latch, but this works fine too. There's not a whole lot of water in the pipes. A third option and the path least traveled is to use a power switch and cut power to the chemplants entirely.
with all these beacons i thought for sure the ratio would be out of wack. consuming only petroleum there is no excess light or heavy oil.
i'm curious about the bang per watt ratio with this vs more refineries / chem plants.
i normally have each refinery and chem plant touched by a single speed beacon. then filled with productivity. ratios go south and need to adjust for that.

for limiting cracking, i use SR latches to give them a range so they are not sputtering/thrashing.
just a pump with > set works, but it is not very engineer like. :P

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Re: 5:1:7 Refinery, heavily beaconed

Post by Avezo »

Aeternus wrote:Have you stresstested this design to determine the max flow rate? Looks like a bit of a power hog with that amount of beacons... bit excessive but it should definately be fast.
Here are stats once lubricant tank is full and fluid void attached to gas tank, so cracking works at full load:
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