Problem with metal refinery

[SmiejaP]

I have 4 metal refineries next to each other setup exactly the same way. Number 1 has 1090 kg of petroleum and i can't refine anything or add any more petroleum because output pipe is full. Number 2 has full 1200 kg of petroleum and works just fine loop starts flowing right after duplicant finishes a task. Other two behaves exactly like number one. Does anyone knows why sometimes they get stuck and sometimes don't.

[gghhrr]

Your number one metal refinery can't work because the output pipe is blocked

and your petroleum is blocked at input pipe until your metal refinery has an empty output pipe

that is a deadlock

you just need to plumb few kg of petroleum to have it work

[SmiejaP]

Ok but then why does number two works fine even if it has more petroleum inside?

[TheMule]

28 minutes ago, SmiejaP said:

Ok but then why does number two works fine even if it has more petroleum inside?

Do they produce the same metals? What do their queues look like? Please post their production orders. I've got the feeling than n.1 is queued to produce only one kind of metal, the other different kinds at the same time.

IIRC, a single task refinery would fill its internal reserve up to 800kg of coolant. But usually I just put a reservoir as part of the coolant loop (that will always drain any output from the refinery no matter what). You can get away with having more that 40 pipe segments in the cooling loop.

Anyway, I think you have bigger problems. You don't check the temp of the coolant before it enters the refinery. That's a recipe for disaster. Should anything happen to the steam chamber, the turbines, etc., you're at risk of inputting petroleum hotter than 406C. It'll break the pipes are release 540C something sour gas (quite a bunch of it, you're got 400kg of it inside the refinery).

I always put a sensor and a shutoff right before the refinery. If you do that, potentially you have to store 1200Kg of coolant outside the refinery until it cools down. That's where the reservoir really comes into play.

[SmiejaP]

I tried this design on previous save and haven't got any problems so far, i will have to run few more cycles to see if anything happens. They all got steel queued up, for now i fixed it i just emptied the pipes and refilled them and now all of them works fine with 1200kg of coolant. Still it's weird that this get stuck only sometimes.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Likely what happened was that during filling, a smelting task was completed.  This started the "drain" while your fill pipes were still connected.  For however many segments of pipe before the output from your smelter reached the output from your fill pipes, you would have filled from your fill pipe.  This made you end up with 1 too many packets of coolant in your system for each segment of pipe between those outputs.  Using a plumber to empty that number of pipe segments of coolant should have solved the problem.

[Neotuck]

Liquid reservoirs make good buffers to prevent pipes from backing up.  I suggest building one in the heat exchange room on top of a metal tile so the petroleum can exchange heat with the steam

[PIRATE D KING]

17 hours ago, SmiejaP said:

I have 4 metal refineries next to each other setup exactly the same way. Number 1 has 1090 kg of petroleum and i can't refine anything or add any more petroleum because output pipe is full. Number 2 has full 1200 kg of petroleum and works just fine loop starts flowing right after duplicant finishes a task. Other two behaves exactly like number one. Does anyone knows why sometimes they get stuck and sometimes don't.

 i would empty refinery 1 contents, or deconstruct it, if you previously had another liquid as coolant sometimes the game doesnt like that.

2 hours ago, Neotuck said:

Liquid reservoirs make good buffers to prevent pipes from backing up.  I suggest building one in the heat exchange room on top of a metal tile so the petroleum can exchange heat with the steam

i was about to suggest the same but then i realised the refinery that doesnt work is the one with more free space so he shouldnt be having that problem.

[SmiejaP]

I think i'll just do liquid tanks in steam room thanks for all of the suggestions.

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, SmiejaP said:

I think i'll just do liquid tanks in steam room thanks for all of the suggestions.

make sure to build them on metal tiles, they always exchange heat with tiles below and insulated tiles would block that

[suicide commando]

On 14/03/2020 at 8:10 PM, Neotuck said:

Liquid reservoirs make good buffers to prevent pipes from backing up.  I suggest building one in the heat exchange room on top of a metal tile so the petroleum can exchange heat with the steam

I second this. Bonus points for setting it up so that hot petrol loops around in the steam chamber, and only cooled petrol goes into the metal refinery.