[BUG?] Fill valve + Flow valve unpredictable behavior
I have a big dam and I' trying to set the output flow to feed my canals. I reduced the output to 1 tile to keep it "simple"
My big dam flow into a mini-dam. I used a fill valve to ensure the output stays at 85cm inside the mini-dam.
The output of that mini-dam is a flow valve that ensures a (smooth) constant pressure in my canals.
The issue is, my escape flow valve is rated 0.95m3/s but it only outputs 0,3 because the water in the minidam seems to be bouncing to 0.91, therefore cutting the fill valve so often that it reduces the total flow to 0,3.
I think this is by design of the fill valve. it has no smoothing (it's either 100% on/off) and I would need a bigger mini dam to do the smoothing; but then I don't see the use case for the fill valve as it's so bouncy. I'm not sure what's the design/gameplay idea was. Are we supposed to embed one into the other? Other maybe build a flow sensor on top and automate the fill valve with a flow sensor? then I missed the point.
I tried to invert the setup (flow first, fill after) also difficult to tune, lots of bounces.
I would find it easer to have a single fill valve with flow control and reaction speed control Even it if means upgrading each feature through science).
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25 Jun
Jcheung AdminHighlighted comment
you're not reading the entire outflow. the gauge only measures its tile, not its neighbors. as such, one you have upstream will never be able to measure the full flow. to measure properly, channel the flow into a 1 width channel and place the gauge in the middle of the 1 width channel
there is not really a purpose for the middle wall either, mini-dam doesn't do much to help anything. -
26 Jun
NewBeaverThx! Indeed logic error from my side.
I understood it later in my playthrough when I used advanced mechanical pumps which kept bumping on and off. They have a fill valve algorithm.
In my example above I was missing the key element that travelling water will always reduce its height.
At the end of my stream (waaaaay further down) I had a flood gate set at 0,65m to retain some water.
In my example above, the fill valve would stop filling because my water level would reach 0,85m (setpoint) before reaching its full flow potential, because downstream, my floodgate would rise the water level too high upstream.
The end result was a flow at 0,3m/s which is expected from the game perspective but not what I expected.
I could fix my issue by fully opening my flood gate downstream, the fill limit would never be reached, so the flow valve could throttle, as I expected it.
I think I missed that education from the tutorial (i.e.: discovering water elevation goes down by X cm every X tiles)