Metal refinery: Is this normal?

[E Man]

I have a metal refinery that uses petroleum in a loop that gets cooled in a steam turbine setup. I first fill the loop with petroleum so it seems enough. Start using the refinery until it hits a "Awaiting coolant" and add more coolant at that point if I need to. Soon enough, I will get an "Output full" message, at which point the refinery won't work. I get a plumber to extract petroleum from the pipe just until the "output full" goes away and I immediately click cancel. So far so good. Seems like it should be primed with the exact right amount of petroleum.

But as the coolant subsequently circulates, the "Awaiting coolant" message reappears and the operator walks away. A few seconds later the "Awaiting coolant" message goes away (no added petroleum), the operator starts again, but a few seconds later the "Awaiting coolant" message reappears again and the cycle continues.

It seems like I should have the exact amount of petroleum needed in the loop here. What am I doing wrong?

[admiral awesome]

Screenshot might help. However, if im not missing something, the "awaiting coolant" sounds like the typical problem of high skilled dupe versus pipe flow.

The refinery has a tank of 800kg liquid and uses 400 kg per task. These 400 kg go into a second internal tank once the refinery has to do something. The visible bar in front is set back. It takes 40 seconds on speed 1 to refill that amount.
Recipes also take 40 seconds but when your dupe is significantly faster, thanks to a high machinery skill and lamps, then you can do only 2 tasks and the dupes have to wait until the refinery is ready again.

Maybe the visual front bar is a bit confusing because you missed the moment when it was set back and you just looked at a empty bar twice.

[E Man]

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOpuwqI8jPg

No lamps. The dup (Jana) has only 13 machinery.

[Aranador]

Yes this is basically normal. The Refinery holds 800kg of coolant, and uses 400kg at a time. It needs to flush all of that out (takes 40 seconds to pump 400kg) so unless you find the slowest duplicant in the universe, he will finish refining tasks faster than the machine can cycle through its internal storeage.

[frank2351]

using a liquid reservoir in your loop might help

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by Aranador:

Yes this is basically normal. The Refinery holds 800kg of coolant, and uses 400kg at a time. It needs to flush all of that out (takes 40 seconds to pump 400kg) so unless you find the slowest duplicant in the universe, he will finish refining tasks faster than the machine can cycle through its internal storeage.

yeah exactly this, the best way you can keep production up is to simply have more than 1 refinery fed from the same loop. it'll always take a long while to pump all the output fluid so once they blow through it twice there is some down time.

but with multiple refinery, the dupe can simply be told to move on to the next one and hit it twice while the previous one refills. never really thought about optimizing smithy production like this so i dont know the count you'd have to do but it'll scale up with dupes having higher machinery stats. if i had to take a wild guess on a loop setup like that (to which i would add a liquid resevoir if scaling the setup up as a bufffer for the coolant output for refinery.) maybe try like 4 smithy. just be sure to have them powered and plumbed right, and have about 850kg of petrol per refinery in the pipes. that should keep downtime to a minimum if you got 1 dupe doing it. not sure if there is some kind of automation you can add so only 1 dupe is doing the task but they run the machines in sequence rather than 4 dupes hopping on all at once to clog everything up.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Xilo The Odd:

Originally posted by Aranador:

Yes this is basically normal. The Refinery holds 800kg of coolant, and uses 400kg at a time. It needs to flush all of that out (takes 40 seconds to pump 400kg) so unless you find the slowest duplicant in the universe, he will finish refining tasks faster than the machine can cycle through its internal storeage.

yeah exactly this, the best way you can keep production up is to simply have more than 1 refinery fed from the same loop. it'll always take a long while to pump all the output fluid so once they blow through it twice there is some down time.

but with multiple refinery, the dupe can simply be told to move on to the next one and hit it twice while the previous one refills. never really thought about optimizing smithy production like this so i dont know the count you'd have to do but it'll scale up with dupes having higher machinery stats. if i had to take a wild guess on a loop setup like that (to which i would add a liquid resevoir if scaling the setup up as a bufffer for the coolant output for refinery.) maybe try like 4 smithy. just be sure to have them powered and plumbed right, and have about 850kg of petrol per refinery in the pipes. that should keep downtime to a minimum if you got 1 dupe doing it. not sure if there is some kind of automation you can add so only 1 dupe is doing the task but they run the machines in sequence rather than 4 dupes hopping on all at once to clog everything up.

All that does is make the time between downtime longer while making the downtime proportionally longer. The loop is still only filling 10 kg/s no matter how many you attach to the loop.

[chaney]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

All that does is make the time between downtime longer while making the downtime proportionally longer. The loop is still only filling 10 kg/s no matter how many you attach to the loop.

A basic element of process engineering design is to identify "speeds and feeds" to find out where the bottleneck is. That's a very good example. Here are some thoughts that may or may not apply to game play - sorry for my lack of experience in the game.

With "batch" processes things can be a bit more complicated. In the case where one Dupe will "always" be operating a Refinery or a group of Refineries on a cooling loop, using up coolant faster than 10 kg/s averaged over each batch, that single loop bottleneck of 10 kg/s is the process rate limit for sure. If you keep continuous operation around the clock with one or more Dupes working at a time, the same applies and the coolant input can limit the process, wasting Dupe time.

With a singular Dupe running all the Refineries, taking a break once a night, adding extra machines that can be primed over-night could keep them busy when "at work" as long as the full Cycle coolant consumption does not exceed 10 kg/s.

Of course, an additional cooling loop could be added to allow for Dupe time efficiency. Each machine gets its own loop and a singular Dupe can swap between machines as each runs low. Expand as desired to keep the number of Dupes you want busy with lower travel overhead.

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by chaney:

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

All that does is make the time between downtime longer while making the downtime proportionally longer. The loop is still only filling 10 kg/s no matter how many you attach to the loop.

A basic element of process engineering design is to identify "speeds and feeds" to find out where the bottleneck is. That's a very good example. Here are some thoughts that may or may not apply to game play - sorry for my lack of experience in the game.

With "batch" processes things can be a bit more complicated. In the case where one Dupe will "always" be operating a Refinery or a group of Refineries on a cooling loop, using up coolant faster than 10 kg/s averaged over each batch, that single loop bottleneck of 10 kg/s is the process rate limit for sure. If you keep continuous operation around the clock with one or more Dupes working at a time, the same applies and the coolant input can limit the process, wasting Dupe time.

With a singular Dupe running all the Refineries, taking a break once a night, adding extra machines that can be primed over-night could keep them busy when "at work" as long as the full Cycle coolant consumption does not exceed 10 kg/s.

Of course, an additional cooling loop could be added to allow for Dupe time efficiency. Each machine gets its own loop and a singular Dupe can swap between machines as each runs low. Expand as desired to keep the number of Dupes you want busy with lower travel overhead.

yeah this seems the best way to go about it, its true ultimately you hit a bottleneck of the coolant fill rate, but if you set it up so only 1 dupe needs to run the task, you can setup their schedule around that fact, so your production rate might not go any faster, but you can make the dupe happier and more time efficient in his duties from wake till sleep.