Heat Exchanger and Radiators

[Chayak]

Running a bunch of pipes around is tedious and the basic mechanics and concept is so simple that it would be a nice addition to the game to have heat exchangers and radiators. With those having pumps with inputs and outputs so you can create loops would be handy as well. It creates some more interesting options for creating cooling and heating loops without having masses of snaking pipes.

Just a suggestion.

[vovik]

Termal plates. !Termal plates! 

[Chayak]

On 2/17/2018 at 7:54 PM, vovik said:

Termal plates. !Termal plates! 

While they do work environmentally they have horrible heat transfer when it comes to air or liquid in pipes to the pipes themselves before contacting the thermal plates even with something like tungsten. Something as simple as a thermal plate liquid pipe would make things a lot less tedious.

[ImpalerWrG]

Yes I've tried thermal plates behind pipes and they are not very good, a modified pipe segment (basically just the inverse of insulated pipe) would be very handy and consistent with the games physics.

Edit:  Just give it some visuals like a little perpendicular fins to make it look like a radiator.

[Mjello]

Thermal plates and pipe materials are actually just fine.

The problem is the liquid - material interface

The heat transfer will be determined by the object with the lowest heat transfer rate

So we are limited to the liquids transfer ability. Its lower than most materials in the game rendering tungsten and plastic completely useless for a radiator. I love the materials and their different characteristics but unless we can synthesize a liquid with a better heat transfer rate. Radiators will just have to be a giant snake around the base.

However making a big simple loop around the base and piping cold polluted water through it works really well when cooling the base.

[Dopey]

6 minutes ago, Mjello said:

Thermal plates and pipe materials are actually just fine.

The problem is the liquid - material interface

The heat transfer will be determined by the object with the lowest heat transfer rate

But the point of a real life radiator is to transfer heat quicker with a larger surface area.  You can make it out of whatever material you want and it will transfer heat better than just a cylinder pipe of the same material because it has more area to exchange heat with the surrounding fluid.

Is there direct heat transfer between pipes and thermal plates or does the air need to exchange it?

I'd still say it'd be nice to have a radiator that acts as a compacted coil of pipes

[Mjello]

Just now, Dopey said:

But the point of a real life radiator is to transfer heat quicker with a larger surface area.  You can make it out of whatever material you want and it will transfer heat better than just a cylinder pipe of the same material because it has more area to exchange heat with the surrounding fluid.

Is there direct heat transfer between pipes and thermal plates or does the air need to exchange it?

It does not transfer from pipe to backplate. I use "water -> pipe -> tile -> backplate -> room air" when using thermal plates.

I'd still say it'd be nice to have a radiator that acts as a compacted coil of pipes

I like that. Just make them out of tungsten only. Or plastic. Then remove the option for tungsten on pipes.

It seems to me the original ideas in the game, like heat and air management is taking more and more a backseat in the game. Maybe it is too hard to make a casual player friendly game out of. I don't know.

But when I look on the long list of materials that is selectable in filters, I wonder where they have all gone. Only accessible in dev mode it seems.

[ImpalerWrG]

Heat transfer in game dose depend on size of contact area.  So if a radiator pipe segment just has a 10x - 20x greater contact with the liquid inside it and the same increased contact area with the outside environment it will transfer heat at an accelerated rate regardless of what it is made of or what fluid is in it. 

So it would operate a little different from insulated pipe which has the same area as regular pipe plus 'thickness' values that acts as a divisor on the heat transfer rate, I assume thickness can't go below 1 though.  Area can just serve as a multiplier in the same way and it needs to apply internally and externally for the radiator pipe segment.

[TheScaryOne]

What about liquid phosphorus? Or mercury. Maybe we could get "radiating pipes" that are finned, made of 10kg of refined metal and multiply thermal conductivity of whatever is in them by ten?