Kovarex w/ feedback loop

[Shokubai]

A little test I did to try and create a simple loop for the Kovarex process to that accomplishes a few things...

1) Recapture 40 of the 41 produced u-235
2) Remove the 1 extra from the loop to Fuel Cell production
3) Remove the need to hold 120 U-235 at each station allowing better early u-235 generation.
4) Be tile-able

1.png (185.44 KiB) Viewed 10533 times

How it works.
Requester chest is set to request a stack of u-238 (do not request u-235)
Wired Inserter is set to stack size =10 and a condition of u-238 >9 (obviously this could be 1 but w/e)
Priming is simple as dropping 40 u-235 once.


The simple version
Because of the inserter stack size being set to 10 and the wire condition there should always be 1 left over for bots to grab and dump.

BP String

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

Special Note
Late game with lots of bot speed there may be a chance bots interfere with the loop. My fix was simply to place the roboport a bit further away. If you find that bots are a problem for you, changing the Active Provider to a Steel chest wired to a filter inserter "u-235 <10" should remove any chance.


Update 5/21 to use bots making everything simpler.

[MeduSalem]

You can't put in Productivity Modules into the Kovarex Enrichment recipe anyways. That has been disabled as of 0.15.2 because it was overpowered.

Also funny that you did a similar build to mine with belts, the way I described here earlier today where I made an almost identical setup but with Logistic Chests: viewtopic.php?p=264297#p264297

The only thing I do differently is how I trigger the output of the excess U-235... but it is good to know that there are different ways to do it.

[RedDagger]

I'm using a version with no circuitry:

preview

enrichment.jpg (575.32 KiB) Viewed 11644 times

The inserters are as fast as the filter inserters, so it grabs all it needs to keep running from the u-235 produced.

blueprint

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[Shokubai]

Nice. I was earlier game and trying to avoid putting 80 in each centrifuge.

[Aeternus]

Neat pattern RedDagger, that'll go in my blueprint book
[Edit] After I tone those Efficiency modules down to the tier 2 ones. 2x tier 2 = 80% consumption reduction, which is the cap. No need to overkill that unless you're using speed in beacons. Also, if you want to automate priming this (since it'll take a while for that entire cluster to be saturated with U-235) a requestor chest with 5 or so U-235 on request sends a little extra into the start of the loop. Speeds things up a bit if you're not producing a lot of fuel yet.

[RedDagger]

Nice. I was earlier game and trying to avoid putting 80 in each centrifuge.

Neat pattern RedDagger, that'll go in my blueprint book
[Edit] After I tone those Efficiency modules down to the tier 2 ones. 2x tier 2 = 80% consumption reduction, which is the cap. No need to overkill that unless you're using speed in beacons. Also, if you want to automate priming this (since it'll take a while for that entire cluster to be saturated with U-235) a requestor chest with 5 or so U-235 on request sends a little extra into the start of the loop. Speeds things up a bit if you're not producing a lot of fuel yet.

Indeed, the u-235 sitting idle in each cetrifuge is a problem, specially in the early game. It is actually 120 pieces committed to each centrifuge, 80 in the input queue and another 40 in use while the machine is running. I go for a much more blunt approach to mitigate this: every once in a while I go there and manually redistribute the u-235 sitting idle until all centrifuges I plan to use are running.

[MeduSalem]

Nice setup RedDagger!

I think there might be a way to improve your design so you don't need the splitters (which make it impossible to put it between two rows of Beacons)... Let me look into it for a few minutes.

[Edit]

Voilá:

kovarex 2.jpg (147.32 KiB) Viewed 11609 times

0.15.6 Blueprint String

Code: Select all

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The belts are disabled as long as the U-238 output filter inserter is holding U-238. That means the next time the centrifuge finished a cycle it holds 2 U-238 which causes the belt to be disabled and when the U-238 input Inserter is grabbing 5 U-238 from the belt then there will be a gap of 3 items which is enough to drop off the 2 excess U-238 from the U-238 output filter inserter... releasing the signal which then allows the belt to fill up again.

Settings for the Filter inserter is Read Hand Contents in Hold mode, no condition. Settings for the belt is Enable on Condition "U-238 = 0", no reading.

But yeah, it uses a simple CN again. If you are desperately trying to avoid that then your approach is a way to go.

[hoho]

I'm using a version with no circuitry:

It's possible to achieve pretty much exact same results without circuits and fewer smart inserters and it'll be more compact to boot!

Screenshot_20170503_075825.png (1.8 MiB) Viewed 11607 times

It's not too pretty (it kind of grew organically) but shows the basic idea.

The trick is that inserters always prefer the inner side of belt when picking up stuff. When the recipe products are placed on the output belt (below the centrifuges), a second inserter will pick up all that's needed. It starts with U235 so that the produced U238 won't be picked up from the output belt but it will be placed on the inner side of the other belt (above the centrifuges) so that when the other input inserter picks up U238, it will start from the leftover products from the enrichment products before picking up the new uranium from uranium processing. The U235 entering into the belt from the uranium processing won't be a problem as it will be picked up from the upper belt and added to the centrifuges immediately to replace one U235 from the below belt that will simply be picked up by the filter inserters.

Only things you need to take care of is not feeding the system ALL your U238 or it would convert it all into U235 and leave nothing for building fuel cells. For that you can just use a filter inserter to pick up U238 from before it gets added to the enrichers into a chest and stop the belt feeding the enrichers when there isn't enough U238 in the chest to make fuel cells.

Of course, the system won't work if your electricity production drops low enough that the inserters can't pick up stuff as fast as they output on the below belt or the filter inserters can't pick up all the U238.


Of course, it'll still have the "problem" of having 80 U235's in the centrifuges but I found that only matters at the beginning of the process. If you're willing to babysit it for a short while to manually keep it at 40 max in each. Took me around 15 minutes to go from 120 to filling a column of 2x9 machines with at minimum 40 U235's. If you're not in a hurry, just drop at least 40 U235 to the last centriges and it'll trickle down eventually.

Blueprint:

Code: Select all

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[Aeternus]

Why beaconize these things anyway? Speed modules just speed things up at the cost of significantly more energy usage - energywise it's cheaper to just add another centrifuge. The only modules for Kovarex that make sense now (at leas to me) are a pair of level 2 Efficiency Modules to reduce energy consumption by 80% (cap). Then just extend the line as long as you need it. With RedDagger's chain you can basically turn any amount of fuel over. You tend to need so little fuel to support even a humongous plant that it barely makes sense to speed it up. As far as I'm aware, only the Uranium Ore refining and Fuel production can be improved with Production Modules. Beyond that it's more energy efficient to just add more centrifuges.

[MeduSalem]

I admit in the case of recipes that are barely used it doesn't make much sense to beaconize the setup.

But well... can't help it... I like consistency in my layouts. Almost everything is running in a beaconized environment in my map... xD


Also I hope that maybe they are bringing back Productivity Modules eventually... because I think disabling them was just a cheap workaround of not having to fix the actual underlaying problem.

[Shokubai]

I admit in the case of recipes that are barely used it doesn't make much sense to beaconize the setup.

But well... can't help it... I like consistency in my layouts. Almost everything is running in a beaconized environment in my map... xD


Also I hope that maybe they are bringing back Productivity Modules eventually... because I think disabling them was just a cheap workaround of not having to fix the actual underlaying problem.

I think a proper fix would be to simply produce an extra 1 u-235.

[MeduSalem]

I think a proper fix would be to simply produce an extra 1 u-235.

I think that the entire way productivity works should be changed. Instead of creating an extra item out of thin air the productivity modules should actually influence the resource costs to consume less resources, which in turn should be much easier to control for recipes like the Kovarex Enrichment.

But that's just my opinion on the matter... and I think it has been discussed multiple times already and I think the devs don't plan on changing anything.

There are surely people who would be willing to start a debate over it if it then still is productivity or if it would then be resource efficiency.

[Aeternus]

Potato, potatoh, ye.

Your own design only has one flaw in my opinion, Medu: Those Active Provider chests. Why not make them Passive Providers so they'll fill up and jam the production process and shut down the Kovarex plant? Active providers run the risk of filling up your storage chests with that stuff - I am -very- cautious in using active provider stuff. I generally use it only for things like empty barrels on a botnet barrel loop, with a small barrel production checking for shortages in a combined storage depot, or quickly trashing an inventory's worth of wood.

[MeduSalem]

Potato, potatoh, ye.

Your own design only has one flaw in my opinion, Medu: Those Active Provider chests. Why not make them Passive Providers so they'll fill up and jam the production process and shut down the Kovarex plant? Active providers run the risk of filling up your storage chests with that stuff - I am -very- cautious in using active provider stuff. I generally use it only for things like empty barrels on a botnet barrel loop, with a small barrel production checking for shortages in a combined storage depot, or quickly trashing an inventory's worth of wood.

Huh? Where am I using Active Provider Chests? o_o

Is it possible you are refering to hoho's post?


I'm always using Provider chests... there's got to be a very good reason to use Active Provider Chests... Normaly I only use Active Provider ones if I need to give a chest a higher priority in the Logistic Network to ensure that the items put in this chest are consumed before the ones I put in the passive provider ones, or because I need to store huge amounts of stuff in storage chests.

[Aeternus]

Yea, my bad. I meant hoho's design.
I'll probably go with a more basic "input 238 at the back, output and loopback u235 in the front" 2 belt design and use some smart inserters at the output to feed the unused u238 back. 2 smart inserters should be all I need in terms of switching logic - I'll just use the "inserters prefer the close side of the belt" trick to prioritize u238 coming from the output. Should work, and be extendable on the far end... doubt I'll need more then 8 or so anyway.

[hoho]

Potato, potatoh, ye.

Your own design only has one flaw in my opinion, Medu: Those Active Provider chests. Why not make them Passive Providers so they'll fill up and jam the production process and shut down the Kovarex plant?

It's a matter of taste, obviously. I too had regular provider chests there at start but I wanted to process through a ton of ore fast so I changed them to active ones.

[Aeternus]

Yea, I suppose... I've ran into the problem that I forgot about active provider chests somewhere and ended up clogging 16+ storage chests with a single resource type. After dealing with that mess, I've kinda lost my liking for them in most situations.

Here's my own simple setup:

Output of the Uranium refiners gets shoved into passive provider chests. I've done 3 to have a buffer, just in case.
There is a single Requestor chest between the Kovarex centrifuges and the fuel production plant, this one requests 2000 U-238. It gets fed by excess U-238 from the Kovarex refiner output and the fuel reprocessing plant. Since there's only slightly above 2000 in there, there's always room for the extras that return from reprocessing. U-235 has a single chest for a buffer, not connected to logistics currently - it could easily be made to. The single requestor chest above the Kovarex centrifuges takes U-235 coming from the refiners - used it initially to have this thing kickstart itself while I went to do something else, but it is all but obsolete now. The system is jammed in the screenshot since the fuel production assemblers have filled their own buffer.
A bit messy, I used some room left between the pumpjacks and the reactors.
This small cluster feeds 12 reactors throttled, currently around 300MW used and has no trouble doing so. The overcapacity is because I want to see what the nuclear bomb does

[MeduSalem]

Aeternus... you might want to relocate the Empty Fuel reprocessing so that its U-238 output is put onto the belt BEFORE the Kovarex Process output is dumped onto the belt so that the U-238 from the Empty Fuel processing gets higher priority.

Because the way you do it currently you create a priority problem. The reason is that if that chest is above 2000 the belt will clog up... and eventually it will backlog to the Fuel Reprocessing (it already is)... and then the Empty Fuel reprocessing will stall... and then the Empty fuel cells will clog up (they are already clogging on the belt)... eventually it will fill up the requester Chest for Empty Fuel Cells and once that one is full it will clog the Reactor output chests and eventually the reactors themselves.

So basically there should never be a backlog of empty fuel cells or otherwise there is something wrong with the setup.

[Aeternus]

It's a requester chest. It can't clog up because the amount of U-238 used in making fuel is higher then the amount that gets shoved back from the spent fuel reprocessing - any extra U-238 needed is taken from the refining output once the U-238 chest drops below 2000. The whole thing is clogged at the moment because U-235 storage is at maximum, and that's not a problem for this configuration. 'Though it might be cleaner to cut off the Kovarex loop if that chest starts to fill in hindsight... I'll tinker with it a bit

[Amegatron]

I came up to a scheme similar to TS's.

Here is the demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwlpcizH8zM

The difference is that U-238 is not recaptured directly. Instead, it outputs to a loopback-belt with throughput-limiter (so it always has space for U-238 to be put there).