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Rate limit shipping rails


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Challenge for y'all: I want a continuous stream of 1.4kg packets of lumber going across a shipping rail. Can it be done?

Requirements:

  1. Each packet on the rail must be as close to 1.4kg without going under. (Don't want to starve the distilleries.)
  2. The stream should be continuous - can't just send one 20kg packet every 14.3 seconds.
  3. The system needs to be on-demand - some way to turn it on and off at will.
  4. It should be as power-efficient as possible. (If it draws more power than an aquatuner I might as well do that.)
  5. Materials used should be available on Arridio without space materials.

Background: I'm running distilleries and counterflowing the lumber against the ethanol is pretty effective. I can get the ethanol down to the lumber temperature (~16° C) in a big 'ol heat exchanger (~15t of refined aluminum plus more ore for the rail) with intermittent 20kg packets, but I want to see if I can make the HEX smaller.

I guess the challenge should be to find the most efficient way to HEX lumber and ethanol.... (But I am curious about rate limiting too.)

TY

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Personally I just moved all lumber to my distilleries and split it equally, however if you wanted to limit to 1.4kg per stack, I would do a setup where the conveyor loader is supplied by a sweeper loading from a storage bin that is set to 1.4kg max. The 1.4kg storage bin is supplied by another sweeper that has access to another storage bin filled completely with lumber. So since the bin is limited to 1.4kg, you can only load a maximum of 1.4kg from the bin to the conveyor loader.

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1 hour ago, Glassyfo said:

Can conveyor loaders be limited to 1.4kg like storage bins?

Nope. That'd be too easy.

1 hour ago, ExEvolution said:

Personally I just moved all lumber to my distilleries and split it equally, however if you wanted to limit to 1.4kg per stack, I would do a setup where the conveyor loader is supplied by a sweeper loading from a storage bin that is set to 1.4kg max. The 1.4kg storage bin is supplied by another sweeper that has access to another storage bin filled completely with lumber. So since the bin is limited to 1.4kg, you can only load a maximum of 1.4kg from the bin to the conveyor loader.

That gets one 1.4kg packet on the rail every fifth segment or so. Saturating the rail with 1.4 packets is the tricky part.

The point is to transfer as much of the heat energy from the outgoing ethanol to the lumber as you can. I'm feeding nosh beans.

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Instead of limiting the amount of lumber on each rail section, you could instead slow the rail down. It should have precisely the same effect average. Some ethanol packets will be cooler than than with 1.4kg/s lumber flow and some will be warmer but on average the effect should be exactly the same.

So if your target is 1.4kg/s then just have 20kg come through every 14.3 seconds. You can do that with a conveyor shut off and a timer sensor.

It's similar to but not quite the same as your current set up using intermittent packages because with intermittent packages the rail is too fast so it not have anywhere near the same effect as the slowed down full rail.

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32 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

if your target is 1.4kg/s then just have 20kg come through every 14.3 seconds. You can do that with a conveyor shut off and a timer sensor.

That's what I'm doing now. Just curious if I can make a smaller heat exchanger with smaller, continuous packets of lumber.

46 minutes ago, ExEvolution said:

Maybe you can pass everything on the rails and the ethanol through a pressurized hydrogen room to equalize the temperatures, just a long room with the ethanol counterflowing against the lumber, tempshift plates made of aluminum for good measure

A checkered HEx where the segments are thermally isolated from each other is more efficient than a field of high-TC stuff with no separation. That will eventually equalize at the sorta difference in temperatures, whereas breaking up the heat exchange can get you much lower. (See: Tony Advanced's video on heat exchange.)

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1 minute ago, occamrazor said:

That's what I'm doing now. Just curious if I can make a smaller heat exchanger with smaller, continuous packets of lumber.

It doesn't sound like it's what you're doing. What I'm suggesting is letting one packet out of the heat exchanger every 14.3s. To me it sounds like you're sending one packet through the heat exchanger every 14.3s. As I explain there's actually a very significant difference between the two.

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1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

It doesn't sound like it's what you're doing. What I'm suggesting is letting one packet out of the heat exchanger every 14.3s. To me it sounds like you're sending one packet through the heat exchanger every 14.3s. As I explain there's actually a very significant difference between the two.

Yah, I'm limiting the incoming lumber at its origin. Didn't think about doing that at the distillery end. Thanks. Bonus: the enable/disable automation run is much shorter.

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I made a small test set up.

image.thumb.png.626326e0791fc7e43685946a42feff3f.png

I used 17C igneous rock here and 77C ethanol.

The top one with one packet let out every 7.1s averages 59C 5kg/s ethanol output.

The bottom one with one packet let through every 7.1s average 70C 5kg/s ethanol output.

So the top one is about 2½ times as efficient in this set up (18C drop vs 7C drop)

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I haven't really used them much before, but could you use a rail bridge just like a liquid bridge?

Have the bridge go to a receiver bin while having overflow continue on, resulting in a forever full rail line And a full bin for the sweeps to use on the distillery?

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6 hours ago, ExEvolution said:

Personally I just moved all lumber to my distilleries and split it equally, however if you wanted to limit to 1.4kg per stack, I would do a setup where the conveyor loader is supplied by a sweeper loading from a storage bin that is set to 1.4kg max. The 1.4kg storage bin is supplied by another sweeper that has access to another storage bin filled completely with lumber. So since the bin is limited to 1.4kg, you can only load a maximum of 1.4kg from the bin to the conveyor loader.

I was thinking the same thing, but it turns out that storage bins do not accept decimals. So we could send 1kg (which I do in stables for transporting 1 egg) or 2kg, not 1.4kg. I didn’t know this.

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I'm pretty sure that the heat output of a petroleum generator depends on the building temperature and nosh beans need to be below 0 in order to grow so in either case, there's not really a good reason to counterflow ethanol down to 16C. As far as 1.4kg packets idk a good way to do that but if you counterflow for more ethanol distillers (say 10kg of lumber) the effects of not running a continuous stream aren't so bad. 

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On 11/2/2020 at 10:20 PM, Niko_ said:

I'm pretty sure that the heat output of a petroleum generator depends on the building temperature and nosh beans need to be below 0 in order to grow so in either case, there's not really a good reason to counterflow ethanol down to 16C. As far as 1.4kg packets idk a good way to do that but if you counterflow for more ethanol distillers (say 10kg of lumber) the effects of not running a continuous stream aren't so bad. 

I'm not putting ethanol into generators. It's going to nosh beans so the closer the ethanol is to their preferred temperature range the less powered cooling I have do to. Looking for all the heat economy I can find.

 

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15 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

So? Did the slowed rail set up improve efficiency?

Yeah. I knocked about a third off the HEx. And rate-limiting the output is so much easier than fiddling around dividing lumber into 1.4kg piles.

HEx is a checkerboard of 65 tiles of aluminum (9,750kg between plates & pipes).

The arbor tree room is ~16° C (the bottom of their preferred range) and ethanol comes out around that temperature before going into powered cooling down to the nosh bean preferred temperature. Lumber comes out at about 45° C before getting destroyed in the distiller.

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4 hours ago, occamrazor said:

I'm not putting ethanol into generators. It's going to nosh beans so the closer the ethanol is to their preferred temperature range the less powered cooling I have do to. Looking for all the heat economy I can find.

you need to cool the room a bit extra anyways so you need to install a cooling solution. In that case the only benefit of the counterflow is to save a bit of power, it's not worth the resources/time to build it since power becomes very plentiful in the midgame. If you still want to do it just for fun I can understand that but it's not too practical if that's your goal. 

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50 minutes ago, Niko_ said:

In that case the only benefit of the counterflow is to save a bit of power, it's not worth the resources/time to build it since power becomes very plentiful in the midgame.

Midgame power is plentiful, but the more you produce the more byproducts you have to deal with. Most resources, like refined metals, are also plentiful in the midgame and I think it is worth the effort to prevent the production of heat and carbon dioxide and polluted water I don't need.

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