Gold space heaters overheating

[riwenna]

So I just noticed I accidentally built all my space heaters, which are keeping the temperature for my balm lilies in a drecko farm at a comfortable 36*C, out of copper ore. Because I purposefully built one out of gold amalgam when I was building my next room, and it overheated and the building broke in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, with the copper ore space heaters, they seem to stabilize around 68*C and heat the room with no problems.

Could anybody who is more versed in physics and heat transfers explain what and why happened here?

Here is the room setup:

The bottom is chlorine, around 2500g/tile, and the top is hydrogen, around 2000g/tile (I wasn't super precise when filling the room, just had them bring a couple of bottles of both gases in, since I find it faster for a room this size than to set up piping). The tempshift plates are (refined) gold in the middle behind the space heater, and iron otherwise. The current room temperature is around 32*C.

So, basically, why is everything working perfectly when I make the space heater out of copper ore, but the space heater overheats and breaks when it's made out of gold? Is it simply the higher thermal conductivity of copper vs gold ore that makes such a difference?

[Saturnus]

I noticed the same thing. Any other metal other than gold and space heaters work fine. With gold they break, and quite fast. I think it's because the game have a set temperature where the space heaters break and since gold raises the overheat temperature that they then fall into that range whereas with other metals it does not. 

[riwenna]

Any other metal?? I mean, the overheat temperature for Space Heaters is 125*C, and if you build them out of gold ore (and the temp they broke at) was 50*C more, so 175*C. Building them with copper, their temperature does not go over 68-69*C, or does so very, very slowly.

So, what I'm noticing about gold, of all the other raw ores, has the smallest thermal conductivity and a small heat capacity.

Wolframite has a high thermal conductivity but the lowest heat capacity out of all the raw ores, while iron and copper are somewhere in the middle with the thermal conductivity (obviously much lower than wolframite), but have a much higher heat capacity (0.386 (DTU/g)/*C for copper ore, 0.150 (DTU/g)/*C for gold amalgam).

So... have you tried building them out of wolframite to see if the same thing happens? I'm tempted now just to test it, but it seems like, due to a lower heat capacity of gold (heat capacity -> how much energy it takes to heat up 1g of the material by 1*C), it heats up much more quickly than the other metals.... not sure how the thermal conductivity comes in to play, but sounds like a lower thermal conductivity could also contribute as the heat would also be dispersed from the object much slower.

[Saturnus]

9 minutes ago, riwenna said:

Any other metal??

If you build space heaters of any other metal than gold they don't break.

10 minutes ago, riwenna said:

So... have you tried building them out of wolframite to see if the same thing happens?

Yes. I've tried wolframite, copper, and iron. They all do not break. Only if it's built of gold amalgam does it break. 

[riwenna]

So I suppose then my guess would be that it's the low heat capacity coupled with low thermal conductivity that does it. Can anybody... confirm if I'm on the right track?

[Saturnus]

Just now, riwenna said:

So I suppose then my guess would be that it's the low heat capacity coupled with low thermal conductivity that does it. Can anybody... confirm if I'm on the right track?

I'm pretty sure it's just a bug.

[The Plum Gate]

1 hour ago, riwenna said:

So I suppose then my guess would be that it's the low heat capacity coupled with low thermal conductivity that does it. Can anybody... confirm if I'm on the right track?

It does sound like a bug - mingling other people's observations with your own - chlorine is a very poor thermal conductor, so this specific combination of gold amalgam and chlorine might be an accomplice. ( or not ).

[Soulwind]

I've noticed that with the other metals, the space heater will go to a point and then auto-shut-off until it cools a bit.

With gold, it just keeps going and breaks itself.

 

[NanoD]

Why gold amalgam space heaters break is because bad heat transfer. It checks surrounding temp to check if it going to turn off. 

You can try to build a polymer press of gold amalgam. It will be hard to cool it down because of the bad heat transfer.