Mistery Ice - what mechanics are at play here?

[sirloxley]

Can anyone help me understand how that could have happened? I am not very familiar with flaking, etc. so I guess that ice is condensed Steam, but ... how?

I will build an insolated tile to fix that corner in the steam chamber which I guess is the reason somehow.

Yet I would still like to understand the (game) mechanics at play here. Just for completeness sake in the steam chamber I have 130kg of Steam at about 200 degree Celsius.

(If it matters, I am playing with the DLC, but I don't think it does hence that's why I post here)

[ghkbrew]

The exactly 10kg quantity makes me think you deconstructed a pipe full of water at some point, which then froze.

[SharraShimada]

14 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

The exactly 10kg quantity makes me think you deconstructed a pipe full of water at some point, which then froze.

i would guess some time ago, there was a bit of water in the pipes, and when the state changed to ice, the pipe broke, the ice fell down, and some dupe reparied the pipe in the corner position.(or maybe another tile if they can access the room from the left)

[sirloxley]

Hm. No pipe was ever damaged nor was there water in that cool chamber ... now I have 15kg ice btw (so 5 more), but nothing since I added that corner.

[wachunga]

What is the temperature of the insulated tile with the bridge in it? Above the crude oil. The bridge may be heating that tile enough to flake the pwater, the resulting steam quickly condenses and freezes. The extra 5kg really sounds like flaking.

Don't build bridges partially in insulated tiles like that. It increases the heat transfer into the insulated tile. Even without the bridge, the insulated tiles may get hot enough to flake. Gas to solid heat transfer gets a hidden 25x multiplier, so those tiles aren't nearly as insulated as one would think. Add a layer of solid or liquid tiles to separate the steam from the insulated tiles, that will remove the multiplier. Or completely separate your cold and hot chambers with vacuum in between.

And an fyi, those plates in the pwater aren't particularly necessary. Liquids get a 625x (!!!) multiplier with other liquids, so heat exchange is already really good, plus the liquid running through the pipes act to even it all out anyhow. Not a critique, just information because people think shift plates are more needed or useful than they really are. The thermal mass is also less than you think because buildings get a hidden 1/5 modifier to heat capacity. Yay for undocumented mechanics?

[sirloxley]

178 Degrees Celsius (the tile is at 117 degrees), so you are telling me to change the piping I guess. Will do.

I use bridges a lot because they are an easy way to break liquid flow without leakage

[wachunga]

A bridge has one temperature, don't ever place them spanning 2 locations you want at different temperatures. The steam is dumping heat into the bridge and the bridge is dumping heat into the insulated tile. When the tile gets hot enough, it will instantly dump enough heat to boil 5kg of pwater, we call this flaking. This cycle repeats with the bridge slowly warming up the tile again. How fast this happens depends on the materials used. Adding that other insulated tile stops the steam to tile heat flow but not the bridge to tile flow. So the process will likely continue once the newly added tile gets up to temp, just slower.

Deconstruct the bridge and move it over one cell leftwards. Add the 2 pipe segments to complete the piping and you should be good. The bridge will still heat an insulated tile, but that tile isn't touching pwater so it'll eventually come up to the steam's temp and then nothing else will happen.

[blakemw]

12 hours ago, wachunga said:

The steam is dumping heat into the bridge and the bridge is dumping heat into the insulated tile...

On further examination the bridge doesn't help but also isn't critical to have this happen.

Steam will exchange heat with insulated tiles not super fast, but noticeably over time. Full tiles of pwater on the other hand will NEVER exchange heat with insulated tiles, not a single DTU, this is due to heat exchange weirdness when tiles with large heat capacities are involved which makes zero sense but is how the game works. (for the curious who want to see with their own eyes, this is best observed by activating debug mode, which allows using the tile "sample" tool, which tells you the exact temperature of a tile without rounding, so you can immediately see that a tile is or is not changing temperature, makes such testing much quicker than waiting for a tile to change by 0.1 C)

So the steam will gradually heat up the insulated tiles, but the pwater can only cool them down via partial evaporation as normal heat conduction is zero.

The bridge does make this happen sooner though.

General solutions are tricky - I mean besides not putting hot and cold things side-by-side. One option is double-walling, which either ensures there is zero heat exchange between the two insulated tiles (or even if there isn't zero heat transfer, delays the issue for many thousands of cycles), or contrarily, ensures that heat exchange happens in both directions, so like pwater can exchange heat with non-insulated igneous rock tiles, and those tiles can exchange heat with insulated tiles. In some of my builds I also run pipes through insulated tiles to heat or cool them (basically fixing them to the temperature of the cooling loop) instead of letting them change temperature at their own whim and possibly reaching partial evaporation/freezing temperatures.

Overall this is a pretty unusual issue because it's not typical to separate steam and water by just a single layer of insulated tiles.