Heat propagation in gas?

[Nova Starlight]

In the post Decrypting heat transfer it is mentioned that:

Quote

• Heat propagation in gas: when a gas cell receives heat, it will send some of it to the cell above if it contains the same type of gas. If the cell is losing heat, it will instead propagate some of that loss to the cell below if it contains the same type of gas. This propagation continues until the next cell contains a different element, or if the transferred heat is too low. Source: experimentation in debug mode.

Is this real? I could not reproduce it.

[asurendra]

It works. As you can see gas above heated very fast while below its almost intact. Thats mechanics simulates real life convection

[Nova Starlight]

That is convection by vertical tile swapping right? That, I know of. I was thinking of a more literal interpretation of the quote. As in, when a gas cell receives heat it literally conduct some of that upwards, independent of tile swapping.

[asurendra]

5 hours ago, Nova Starlight said:

That is convection by vertical tile swapping right? That, I know of. I was thinking of a more literal interpretation of the quote. As in, when a gas cell receives heat it literally conduct some of that upwards, independent of tile swapping.

Actually there is no temperature driving vertical swapping. It would be too hard to implement it so devs use vertical conduction instead. This mechanics is only convection that game supports

[blakemw]

In my sandbox testing what happens in gas is just tile swapping, with vertical tile swapping only happening if the tile underneath is hotter. Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong due to false analogy with liquids.

Here's the easy way to demonstrate. In sandbox, paint tiles of like 1000 kg of 0 C chlorine gas. Then paint a single 1000 kg tile of 100 C chlorine in the 0 C chlorine gas. Then watch with temperature overview, and it'll be readily observed that the hot chlorine tile is just swapping around and gradually rising (and only rising) by swapping. There's very little transfer of heat to other gas tiles. Once upon a time gas tiles would occasionally average out their temperature when horizontally adjacent (but not vertically), though this doesn't seem to happen anymore, it might have been removed to fix heat multiplication glitches or something.

On the other hand, in liquids it's much more like what is described. When a liquid tile is hotter than the (same type) liquid tile above it, they'll simply average out their temperature as if they have infinity thermal conductive (fully equalizing temperature in no time), but when the hotter tile is on top only normal conduction applies. This causes heat to rise in a column. But liquids have enough thermal conductivity that temperatures even out pretty quickly to a large extent, it's not like gas where you can quite easily have like 500 kg steam tiles kicking around and so can actually observe weird convective effects.