... Cool?

[GuyPerfect]

I'm still a bit new to the oil refinement thing, having been experimenting with a plethora of different concepts since I started playing. A while back I identified the importance of temperature control in the production areas, and nowadays I seek out cold biomes before building even my first power plant! The Snow and Ice get packed into a Water storage tank where it's portioned out to little 100Kg bins for steady melting. This is a steady source of liquid Water, and as a bonus, the whole tank gets colder as time goes by.

It only seemed a natural fit to use one of these cold Water tanks as the site of a Thermo Aquatuner, since running one of those things in a gaseous atmosphere very quickly leads to it overheating. I figured I could use it to cool off some amount of Crude Oil before the Water got too hot to sustain any further processing. My setup is as follows:

      

As you can see, the space I allocated for the Crude Oil storage is completely full, since this strategy worked way better than I was hoping it would. In fact, it worked so much better that I'm a little confused as to exactly why...

When I pulled up the Crude Oil, it was around 80 degrees. The tank of Water was sitting at about 5. By volume, the Water occupies a little over twice as much space as the Crude Oil, but the latter is slightly less dense: it evens out at about 875 Kg/tile, whereas Water prefers about 1000 Kg/tile. When the screenshot was taken, the Crude Oil was cooled down to about 15 degrees, but the water was sitting at a chilly 12.

It is my understanding that, for example, if a Thermo Aquatuner is submerged in a tank of the same liquid that's being fed into it, there will be no change in temperature. That is to say, the temperature removed from its input liquid is transferred 1:1 into the liquid in which it is submerged. If we're generous and pretend that the mass of the Water in my example is exactly 2.5 times the mass of the Crude Oil, then that 65 degree drop in Crude Oil temperature should have translated to a 65 / 2.5 = 26 degree rise in the Water temperature, to put it at 31... right?

But that's not what I'm seeing. Don't get the wrong idea: I like that the water's still cold, but I'm having trouble figuring out why it didn't get any hotter than it did. Any thoughts?

[Risu]

13 minutes ago, GuyPerfect said:

If we're generous and pretend that the mass of the Water in my example is exactly 2.5 times the mass of the Crude Oil, then that 65 degree drop in Crude Oil temperature should have translated to a 65 / 2.5 = 26 degree rise in the Water temperature, to put it at 31... right?

Crude Oil and Water both have different heat capacities so measuring the temperature difference between the two liquids won't do much good. It's the joules transferred between them that matters.
 

[GuyPerfect]

Sure enough, that's the deal. I didn't expect the heat capacities to be so different. Crude Oil has 1.69 foobars, but Water is way up there at 4.179 foobars. Well that's fun, it means Oil Upgrade is more accessible than I expected it to be.