Conduction panel exploration

[wachunga]

Putting aside spelunking for bugs, I did a bit of testing on what transfer rates for the conduction panel appear to be. A huge disclaimer that this is very preliminary and likely incomplete or maybe even wrong. And bugs are still lurking about.

Essentially the panel engages in 3 types of heat transfer:

1) Panel building to the 3 cells it occupies. Nothing appears new or novel here. People may be tempted to use it as a 1x3 "shift plate" because it's made of highly conductive refined metals. However in many cases, this type of heat transfer is actually limited by heat capacity and not conductivity. In those cases, a conveyor bridge with it's higher mass is superior. One would have to test their specific scenario to determine the better solution. Should be better than power/automation bridges though.

2) Panel building to piped liquid. Appears to be the same math as radiant or normal pipes, "ConductivityAverage * TemperatureDifference * 10". But the panel storage empties immediately and so only gets one tick of transfer per second instead of a pipe's five. One can throttle the output to keep the panel full (the panel happily merges into partial packets), but then you are throttling your coolant flow rate which is not ideal. The optimal flow rate will likely have to be found with testing for the specific scenario. This is problematic, it should "just work" out of the box. Boo.

3) Panel building to other buildings. Appears to be the same math as building to cell, but 100,000 times slower. That is not a typo. It's so ridiculous that I keep doubting myself. Assuming this is true, then the panel is a hilariously terrible replacement for liquid on the floor. The math seems to be "Conductivity1 * Conductivity2 * TemperatureDifference * HotterHeatCapacity / 1,000,000". Normally that's a divide by ten, not one million.

 

That's all I got for now. I don't even play the game anymore but I was mildly bored.

 

[NeoDeusMachina]

2 hours ago, wachunga said:

3) Panel building to other buildings. Appears to be the same math as building to cell, but 100,000 times slower. That is not a typo. It's so ridiculous that I keep doubting myself. Assuming this is true, then the panel is a hilariously terrible replacement for liquid on the floor. The math seems to be "Conductivity1 * Conductivity2 * TemperatureDifference * HotterHeatCapacity / 1,000,000". Normally that's a divide by ten, not one million.

That was my observation too. Running super coolant through it was barely able to keep up with a "Lamp" (500DTU/s) in a vacuum, so I reverted back to liquid on the floor.

[Mereth]

5 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

That was my observation too. Running super coolant through it was barely able to keep up with a "Lamp" (500DTU/s) in a vacuum, so I reverted back to liquid on the floor.

It seems to keep up with a rabolt generator (5k DTU/s) with simple water in the pipe, but the bad transfer rate prevent the temps from equalizing.

Didn't manage to keep up with an AETN, don't know if the issue was the size of the building, the -80k DTU/s, or the super coolant.

[wachunga]

7 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Running super coolant through it was barely able to keep up with a "Lamp" (500DTU/s) in a vacuum

In this scenario there are 4 factors that affect the heat transfer. The conductivity of the lamp, the conductivity of the panel, the SHC of the lamp, and the temperature delta. It may be tempting to use gold amalgam because it has a +50C overheat, that is an awful idea however. Amalgam has terrible conductivity and SHC. Doing a bit of math in an google sheet, a gold amalgam lamp paired with a copper panel should require a ~555C temperature delta to dissipate the 500 DTU/s. Good luck with that. Iron ore requires ~93C, aluminum ore ~9C, and steel ~6.3C.

Liquid on the floor is soooooooooooooo much faster that most people never knew or cared about the difference in using gold amalgam vs iron ore for example. I have no idea if this a bug or the devs simply don't understand/appreciate how heat transfer works.

[Gurgel]

3 hours ago, Mereth said:

Soo, radbolt is 5kDTU/s. 6C temp difference. Assuming 10kg/s of 8C water which should get heated up to about 8.1C. That would mean something like 5k DTU = 6 C * k, with k depending on the thermal conductivities and here around 830.

That does not seem bad at all. Of course the temps will not equalize if one side heats and the other cools. There will always be a  delta-t, here 6C. That is simple, realistic Physics. 

[degr]

I use it with robominer in vacuum, petroleum used as a medium. Effect is perfect - robominers was chilled to 100-200C. Previously they just reach 1025C, become broken and I demolish and rebuild them. Seems from now that issue is gone.

[Jann5s]

4 hours ago, degr said:

I use it with robominer in vacuum, petroleum used as a medium. Effect is perfect - robominers was chilled to 100-200C. Previously they just reach 1025C, become broken and I demolish and rebuild them. Seems from now that issue is gone.

I feel like that this is the designed application of the panels. Not excellent cooling, but reasonable cooling in these types of situations.

[Saturnus]

11 hours ago, Jann5s said:

I feel like that this is the designed application of the panels. Not excellent cooling, but reasonable cooling in these types of situations.

Placing a vent with waste oxygen near the robominers (and other equipment) in space needing cooling would probably still be the preferred option though.

There are extremely few circumstances where the conduction panel makes any sense to use over traditional methods.

[Elfiwolfe]

1. I am trying the new conduction panel. Running cold water through it to cool hot metal on rails. From what I have found (and it could be wrong) the water in the conduction panel does not matter. The temps at the ends do. Pipes show no water in the entrance side. So Place copper radiant pipe at exit end of the Conduction panel to cool that block (which the conduction panel treats all 3 blocks of conduction panel as same.

    

2. Trying this in place of all radiant pipes and blocks of metal

   Conduction panel vs Radiant/Metal:
   Conduction panel (100kg metal), radiant pipe (50kg metal), raw mineral pipe (100kg raw mineral
   3 metal blocks (300kg metal), 3 radiant pipes (150kg metal)
   150kg metal, 100kg raw mineral vs 450kg metal.

[Sasza22]

On 12/18/2022 at 5:10 AM, wachunga said:

3) Panel building to other buildings. Appears to be the same math as building to cell, but 100,000 times slower. That is not a typo. It's so ridiculous that I keep doubting myself. Assuming this is true, then the panel is a hilariously terrible replacement for liquid on the floor. The math seems to be "Conductivity1 * Conductivity2 * TemperatureDifference * HotterHeatCapacity / 1,000,000". Normally that's a divide by ten, not one million.

So basically it doesn`t do much in vacuum which seemed to be it`s intended purpose. I`m kinda dissapointed by that but i`m yet to try one myself. For now it looks like a good cooler for the buildings that have a liquid input at their center tile. They were hard to keep cool via pipes as you couldn`t pipe water through that tile. I wonder how good it will work for polymer presses.

[Elfiwolfe]

39 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

So basically it doesn`t do much in vacuum which seemed to be it`s intended purpose. I`m kinda dissapointed by that but i`m yet to try one myself. For now it looks like a good cooler for the buildings that have a liquid input at their center tile. They were hard to keep cool via pipes as you couldn`t pipe water through that tile. I wonder how good it will work for polymer presses.

The center tile cannot go over a pipe.

[wachunga]

3 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

So basically it doesn`t do much in vacuum which seemed to be it`s intended purpose.

That entirely depends on the building you are trying to cool. The underlying issue is that buildings give off heat as a multiple of their conductivity AND their thermal mass (along with temperature delta and conductivity of the other material). Buildings with sufficiently high conductivity and thermal mass function just fine with a conduction panel, buildings with insufficient conductivity and thermal mass fail miserably. A refined copper robo-miner is 53x better at giving off heat than a copper ore ceiling light. Even with creating more heat, the miner will stay cooler than the light.

This esoteric minutiae never mattered much because the rate buildings gave off heat was jacked up high enough (especially with liquid on the floor) that the difference between a refined copper robo-miner and a copper ore light was never material in practical terms. For whatever reason the panel isn't jacked up high in the same way, so this minutiae now becomes meaningful.

Consider chlorine gas, what most people think of as an insulator, pulls heat out of buildings 13x better than a copper conduction panel. Draw your own conclusions from that factoid.

[BakerBob]

15 hours ago, wachunga said:

Consider chlorine gas, what most people think of as an insulator, pulls heat out of buildings 13x better than a copper conduction panel. Draw your own conclusions from that factoid.

I've been having trouble understanding people's issues with the conduction panel but this summarises it perfectly, thanks!

[psusi]

That makes sense now.  I built half a dozen ethanol distilleries in space to void the CO2 and tried these new plates to keep them cool.  They manage to keep the smart batteries powering them from overheating, but the much higher heat output of the distillery quickly heated it up to over 125 C with the salt water in the pipe < 20 C.  Good thing the distillers don't seem to have an overheat temperature.

 

[Omaristalis]

I tried using cobalt conduction panels to cool a lead steam turbine with polluted water at 5 degrees C.  Steam turbines constantly overheated, so I'm going back to running them in liquid.

Pretty disappointed with them to be honest - I really don't see any great use for them in my builds.  I was really pretty excited about them when I saw the patch notes!

[wachunga]

2 hours ago, Omaristalis said:

I tried using cobalt conduction panels to cool a lead steam turbine with polluted water at 5 degrees C.

Lead is the worst material to make turbines out of when trying to cool with conduction panels. Make the turbine out of cobalt as well, or even iron or copper. But absolutely not lead or gold. Also put a valve set to 5 kg/s after the panels output. Those 2 changes will make it work MUCH better.

[Zarquan]

On 12/18/2022 at 5:23 AM, Mereth said:

It seems to keep up with a rabolt generator (5k DTU/s) with simple water in the pipe, but the bad transfer rate prevent the temps from equalizing.

Didn't manage to keep up with an AETN, don't know if the issue was the size of the building, the -80k DTU/s, or the super coolant.

To me, this makes the conduction panel seem worth it.  If I can keep a steel autosweeper from overheating with this by simply piping it through a conduction panel like this and running that liquid through a steam room, that makes creating vacuum-based sweepers and similar tools significantly more convenient.  They don't need to be fast if they can keep up within about 100 C of the steam room's temperature.  I will use these all the time in my random machines in vacuums that need minor active cooling, like autosweepers, conveyor loaders, autominers etc.  I might even use them to reduce the temps on my reservoirs that hold magma when I inevitably mess up and they overheat due to broken pipe.  Way better than having to set up random blobs of liquid.  I just wish there was a gas input and output option so I could use hydrogen.

[Joe Dee]

On 1/1/2023 at 12:59 PM, wachunga said:

Lead is the worst material to make turbines out of when trying to cool with conduction panels. Make the turbine out of cobalt as well, or even iron or copper. But absolutely not lead or gold. Also put a valve set to 5 kg/s after the panels output. Those 2 changes will make it work MUCH better.

Does the conduction panel work fundamentally different in that regard than standard liquid bath cooling? With liquid cooling I've observed no difference in turbine cooling regardless of the material it is made of, at least for self-cooled turbines. What makes a huge difference however is the radiant pipe material of course.

I seem to recall that heat transfer is limited by the smallest contributing conductivity, which even for super coolant will be that of the liquid.

[wachunga]

3 hours ago, Joe Dee said:

I seem to recall that heat transfer is limited by the smallest contributing conductivity

There are several methods for heat transfer depending on what is transferring with what. The "lowest conductivity" rule only applies to some of the methods and conduction panel transfer is not one of them. The wiki has a halfway decent page talking about it. https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Thermal_Conductivity Missing the conduction panel because it's new, it uses the same methodology as "building and the cell it occupies" except much, much, much slower. 

"Liquid on the floor" cooling is good enough that differences arising from building material is largely unobservable. Conduction panel is so much worse that those differences are not only observable but super important. Think of the speed of light vs the speed of sound. At small distances (liquid on floor) there is no discernable difference between light (cobalt turbine) and sound (lead turbine). At large distances (conduction panel) there very much is a discernable difference.

Reread everything I have written in this thread and screw around in debug/sandbox making those changes I suggested. Self cooling is probably too much to ask of conduction panels, but you can definitely cool a turbine with a panel connected to an aquatuner loop or similar.

 

 

 

 

[Farsight]

Hopefully this will get patched in the future. It's completely counterintuitive that dumping liquid on the floor is still better than a dedicated cooling pipe.

It's like if you had a water-cooled PC, and removed that system for just dumping a pitcher of water on the case instead.

Heck, they should make water on the floor of powered buildings electrify dupes walking by!

 

[zealyahweh]

building information says that "allowing extreme Temperature exchange with overlapping buildings"

I belive the devs have a typo either in information text or in the code formula

 

Edit after some test

did some test on conduction panel, I found the problem:

1. conduction panel do exchange heat very fast with the overlapping building.

2. conduction panel exchange heat very slow with it's contents liquid. even if using thermium alone with super coolant.

3. then i noticed that if the liquid in pipe in flowing, the liquid stay in conduction panel's contents for only 1 tick and get pump out immediately

4. since the liquid almost not stays in conduction panel, so they only exchange very little heat with conduction panel.

I take this as a BUG, will report it to bug tracker.

And before they fix this issue, there is a workround to use conduction panel:

add a liquid shutoff AFTER conduction panel, connect it to a timer sensor set to 1s/20s, so the liuquid only move once every 20 second and will stay in conduction panel content for a long time to exchange heat

 

just tested with this setup a single conduction panel (thermium/super coolant) can keep up with a steam turbine (on 200C),

and before this you need 5 conduction panel to cool down a single steam turbine

[JRup]

1 hour ago, zealyahweh said:

I take this as a BUG, will report it to bug tracker.

And before they fix this issue, there is a workround to use conduction panel:

A liquid valve after the conduction panel is also a viable workaround for the "timing" issue it has.

I guess this might be a little late to the party, but this thread casually landed in the SO! side of the forum:

 

[asurendra]

Ok, two news. First one:

Quote

• Fixed an issue causing Conduction Panels to behave differently based on the number of asteroids visited and rockets built.

Dunno how it was possible, but it should, maybe, change something? 

Second one: liquid that doesnt stay in conduction panel, now "known issue", so it will be fixed soon. 

Do you think this two will have noticeable effect? Or thats not enough to make panel useful?

[zealyahweh]

2 hours ago, asurendra said:

Ok, two news. First one:

Dunno how it was possible, but it should, maybe, change something? 

Second one: liquid that doesnt stay in conduction panel, now "known issue", so it will be fixed soon. 

Do you think this two will have noticeable effect? Or thats not enough to make panel useful?

If this get fixed, conduction panel will be five times more efficient than now.

To me that will be enough to use

[Joe Dee]

I find the conduction panel very useful to build a fridge in a small vacuum without it overheating, it's super effective. Doesn't even need any liquid going through it, just the center conduction panel tile behind the bottom fridge tile, and its connections conduct the heat away into other tiles. Especially useful since you can't normally keep the fridge cool with a bit of liquid on the floor, because that removes the "sterile atmosphere" buff on the food and it spoils faster.