Liquid splitter

[Coolthulhu]

A T-shaped pump with one input and 2 (or maybe 3) outputs. Not 2 inputs like belt splitter, because pipes can't have mixed contents.

At the moment balancing liquids you can't overproduce is complicated and incredibly unconventional and this would be a very simple fix to that.

[DerivePi]

When do you need to balance liquids? Can't you balance what the liquids produce?

[SHiRKiT]

Then you need to balance the production also. For example, imagine if you have a huge oil processing plant, and your output is pretoleoum. You build everything to convert to petroleum, even heavy oil and light oil. Now, you want to produce Sulfuric Acid and Plastic with this huge petroleum production. The only way to balance it out is to have 2 separated processing plants, which defeats the purpouse of having one big and simple processing plant.

[DerivePi]

OK, I currently do just that. I crack Heavy and Light into Petro. The only other liquid I want is lubricant which I usually store in one liquid storage container. If I had limited oil resources, I wouldn't even consider flame thrower ammo or solid fuel. So my problem would be how to limit the production of lubricant over production of petro. However, this has never been a problem since I limit lubricant to one storage container and only use it to produce a limited amount of electric engines and express belts (I usually limit these items to one stack in a smart chest). Once the lubricant storage is full, I have to incorporate heavy cracking for the overflow.

I can see the point of the OP though. If I needed to reserve the decision of cracking heavy vs producing lubricant, there is currently no automatic way to do so until you get to the production of batteries, proc units, electric engines and express belts. Of course, with only 1 out of 11 units produced being Heavy Oil, this is a problem that will only be encountered in very low oil producing sites.

[SHiRKiT]

Since the pipes will serve first the first chemical plants, if you don't have a production that is higher than the first machines comsuption, you'll never serve the last machines. This is the same issue when you use a single huge resouce line of transport belt, which you can solve by placing a splitter.

[Schmendrick]

This is what pumps are for.

[SHiRKiT]

This is what pumps are for.

Can you technically explain how can pumps solves the First-In-Line-First-Sirved issue that pipes arise?

Imagine this following scenario:

|
|-X1
|
|-X2
|
|-X3
|
|-X4

Petroleoum comes through the pipes (represented here by | -) to machines that consumes petroleum (represented by the X). Now imagine that you are producing 100 petroleum a second, and that X1 consumes 70 petroleum a second, X2 also consumes 70 petroleum a second, but X3 and X4 consumes only 12.5 petroleum a second. How do you give 25% of the petroleum production to each machine, so that each have 25 petroleum a second? Or even better, how do you give 25% of the petroleum to X3 and X4 25% of the production, leaves 70% to X1 and the other 5% to X3? And all of that using pumps?

[DerivePi]

This is what pumps are for.

I thought pumps were for short women who want to appear taller?

[Schmendrick]

Actually I was wrong and I apologize. At least for splitting. You can use pumps for prioritizing (for example, pumping all light oil into a storage tank and letting whatever leaks by after the tank is full and the pump can't grab any more go to cracking), but they don't do a good job of evenly splitting things. I was thinking that two pumps drawing from the same source would grab from it evenly, but they don't.

edit: I think you could still probably use pumps after an intersection( <<< ---- --|-- --- >>> ) to make it roughly even, but this runs into awkward space issues)

[ssilk]

As player building up stuff around the refinery I want to have a device that guarantees, that liquids

- can run only in one direction
- split this unidirectional stream into two equal amounts, more or less like the belt splitter

Acceptance criterias:
- the output is two pipes with equal amounts, if pressure on each output side is low enough.

[syneris]

This is what pumps are for.

Pumps don't split evenly, they pull all the fluid up to a fixed amount (0.5 'units'). The problem with that is most fluids don't achieve or maintain that rate of flow.

A liquid splitter would be somewhat precise on dividing the fluid regardless of how much is flowing through it.

[NeoForce]

This does exist but you need to use a storage tank then use the two outputs in the opposite end. both ends will be balanced out by pressure.

[Khyron]

This can be done using two pumps. In the picture below, both storage tanks fill equally.



Edit: Didn't see the second page of posts before I replied...

Pumps don't split evenly, they pull all the fluid up to a fixed amount (0.5 'units'). The problem with that is most fluids don't achieve or maintain that rate of flow.

If the design above doesn't work for really low fluid rates then I'd suggest logging a bug report.

[ssilk]

This is known and I'm not sure, if this is a bug. The way I found which works was that with the tank and the two outputs. That seems to balance the liquids evenly, but I need some more testing to be sure.

[SHiRKiT]

That feels like a bug to me.