Compact refinery+beacon setup tileable in all directions

[Jupiter]

Refinery builds always seem so chuncky to me so I decided to design a setup that is compact and has a lot of beacons to be more space efficient in terms of refining capacity per tile. It is also tileable in both directions.
It has one input pipe for water and oil per column and it has 1 output pipe for gas and HO per row and 1 output pipe for LO per column. This means that there is an upper limit to how big a block of these things can be before saturating the pipes but once you reach it you will have a monstrous throughput anyway.

pics: http://imgur.com/a/AqNDS

Real life setup:

Water and oil come in from below and are divided among the columns. Then gas and HO are output to the right by each row separately and come together into a single pipe but you can of course keep the outputs of each row separate to fully utilize the throughput. LO goes up and is output by each column separately.
The directions of the oil, water and the products do not matter of course. It's up to you on which side of a block you collect the products.

The blueprint is a block of 1x3 refineries as outlined in the picture below.
A close-up:

blueprint

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[vanatteveldt]

Interesting! Intuitively it feels like too many beacons, what is the ratio of refineries per beacon? Wouldn't it be more efficient to put in more refineries and fewer beacons, or is that more difficult to tile?

[Jupiter]

Interesting! Intuitively it feels like too many beacons, what is the ratio of refineries per beacon? Wouldn't it be more efficient to put in more refineries and fewer beacons, or is that more difficult to tile?

I'm not sure what you mean by too many. Do you mean that with more refineries you would get more throughput per tile? Notice that the beacons in between 2 columns reach both columns.
Anyways there are 17 beacons in a blueprint and 3 refineries but the ratio tends to 14 beacons per 3 refineries when you keep tiling in the y direction. This is because there is an overlap of 3 beacons between 2 adjacent BP stamps in the y direction but there is no overlap in the x direction.

I also don't think that the BP can be designed compactly by placing the refineries closer together. This is because I started out with the most compact design without any beacons and then I started placing beacons in the empty spots. Later on I made the gap between refineries just 1 more tile wider to fit in some more beacons to not waste that space. The real hassle I had was with arranging the output pipes. It it probably impossible to design it with less space between the refineries AND increase, or at least maintain, the throughput/tile.

Of course I want to invite people to try and improve my design. I spend quit some time on this but that doesn't mean it's perfect

[DerivePi]

I like it!

The block of 3 refineries, when surrounded by beacons should suck up 42 crude and provide 5/23/28 heavy, light and petro respectively. Figuring a flow capacity of 60 per pipe, you'll need to add some pipes and pumps to increase the flow rate. 2 lines of crude won't cut it.

Wow, you need one line of 10 steam gens per refinery.

[vanatteveldt]

Before I go any further I'll admit I underestimated the problem: I thought you could do a 'normal' linear design with rows of beacons and refineries, but of course that requires three tiles to get rid of three fluids, meaning the beacons don't reach the refineries anymore. @Jupiter solved this quite cleverly by moving some fluids vertically rather than horizontally. Smart!

But let's see if we can improve

I'm not sure what you mean by too many beacons

Yeah, what I mean is that I would try to optimize throughput per cost, where cost can be either building cost or electricity use (with equal prod modules raw input will be the same and I don't particularly care about land use).

To put it differently, you have maximized the beacons per refinery ("number of effect sources") at the cost of refineries per beacon ("number of effect receivers"). Especially the beacons between the refineries reach only 2 refineries each. Moreover, because of the wide gap between refineries the main beacon rows are also not very effective, with some only reaching two refineries. It might be most cost-effective to increase the number of refineries per beacon, at the cost of some crafting speed.

So I tried to optimize the "number of effect receivers" by dropping the beacons between refineries and squeezing the refineries tighter together. It's easy to reduce the gap to 2, but you really want to reduce it to one since a refinery is 5 wide and 5+1 so 5+1 lines up neatly with beacons but 5+2 doesn't, which means some beacons will not be as effective. This is tricky as you seemingly need the extra space to be able to pipe one fluid on the vertical axis. However, if you use a small pump to prevent pipes from touching and stagger the grid by one, you can line it up like this:



Each refinery is now affected by 9 beacons for 5.2 crafting speed (compared to your 12.67 -> .7.03), but each beacon reaches 4.5 refineries (compared to your 2.4). So I need about half the amount of beacons while needing only 1.35 times as many refineries, which makes this solution about 50% more cost efficient a bit more energy efficient.

analysis

If you have 100 refineries you would need (100 * 12.67 / 2.4=) 527 beacons*. This should give a theoretical throughput of 2*7.03*100=1406 crude per second, although I don't think you can get this even if you pipe in oil from each side on each row

To get the same throughput I would need 1406/(2*5.2)=135 refineries. However, these only require 135*9/4.5=270 beacons

So, to get the same throughput as you I will need 1.35 as many refineries, but only about half the amount of beacons. If a refinery costs 1.2 units and a beacon 1 (due to prod3 modules being more expensize), My total costs are (135*1.2+270)=432, while your cost is 100*1.2+527=647.

To check energy use I use helmod with beacons setting [12.67 / .189] for your setup (.189=100/527), which gives 749.8MW to produce 1000 PG/s with 108 refineries and 572 beacons). For my setup I use [9, .5], which gives 686MW for 146 refineries and 292 beacons.

*) This matches "experimental values" from tiling our designs to 6 rows of 18 refineries: you get 108 refineries and 571 beacons (of course a bit less efficient because beacons at the edges reach less refineries), while I get 266 beacons for 108 refineries

blueprint

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[Edit: just reread your reaction and you state that you are optimizing throughput per tile. Both solutions are equally high, mine is less wide per refinery (6 vs 8) but I need 1.35 times the refineries,so I will have slightly smaller throughput per tile (6*1.35=8.1)]

[DaveMcW]

Here is the solution I came up with a couple years ago: