Alright, we’ve all been here. You have your ore processing chain setup, you start it all, and your centrifuge bottlenecks because a tiny purified ore got passed to it and its not a stack of 9.
Rather than use a metric f***ton of hoppers, and rather than only running 1 type of ore in bulk, I spent more time than I care to think about messing around with gregtech pipe flows and figured out this solution:
This system has been running for like 12 stacks of crushed copper ore and not a single tiny ore has gotten into the centrifuge. The centrifuge input MUST be setup like this. If you do not have 1 additional pipe past the centrifuge input then there is a chance that a tiny ore will drop down into the centrifuge if there is a vacant slot (the pipes move more than 1 stack/second, if an item is insta-grabbed by the centrifuge than the feeder pipe will drop a 2nd item through before moving onto a different output path).
I might try changing some of the huge pipes off the sluice to regular item pipes, but I suspect that if the input ores come in 1 at a time then they’ll just insta-drop into the centrifuge. (just tested this and yeah, don’t use regular size pipes at any point)
Also there is a preferential output order, I’ve observed that if a huge pipe can only feed into small pipes, it will prefer the top and bottom outputs before shifting to the forward and back positions, then finally outputting to the right (assuming you fed from the left).
It actually works even if your centrifuge is faster than the sluice. The centrifuge can insta-pull an ore in to process (it doesn’t occupy the visible inventory slot) and your tiny ores will still proceed to the right. Essentially the pipe is trying to output everything in the same tick. The first inventory slot goes to the centrifuge and the remaining 7 slots go to the adjacent pipe, preventing a double deposit.
If you use anything other than an 8 slot pipe you will pull a tiny purified like 1 in 50 which bottlenecks the whole thing.
I would suggest that the behavior you’re describing is fragile, that you’re relying on an indirect property to achieve the result. To be fair, I haven’t a better suggestion. ;]
Pre-aluminum this is the least resource and space intensive solution. In a future setting you would of course utilize item filters using NBT tags. But I’d like to not babysit my machines all the way to aluminum
Are you playing with an old version of gt6? Because since a couple of versions ago you can centrifuge tiny purified ores as well, so, unless you have a specific reason, there is no need to prevent tiny ores to go in your centrifuges.
