7.6 mg of gold does not exchange temperature while on conveyor rail and submerged in water

Everything smaller then 1 gram does have this, i have not yet found a way to prevent this.

I usually make it a cooling loop of conveyor rail so that the system doesn't come stuck, every so often i check if there is something on the loop stuck and let it out manually, the amount of heat it contains is so small that it will not lead to any problems outside the cooling loop.

A alternative can be to make the cooling loop long enough so that the materials are cool when they reach the end so you do not need to measure if they are cool, so the system doesn't jam up.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Upload

This is a known issue, although it's probably intentional on the devs part. I wire up my cooling pond loops with a Timer Sensor to purge themselves every so often. If my loop is 20 meters long I'll set it up to be green for 20 seconds and red for 10 cycles.

I dont think it's intentional and quite surprised to see zero response from devs on this. It is clearly bug and it's ridiculous to see things like OP mentioned or like this.

The limits on thermal conductivity (no transfer under 1g of material, 1degC of temperature change or 1DTU/s) has been documented in the wiki for several years. I expect if the devs considered it a bug, it'd have come up by now.

More likely, it seems like the limitations on heat flow with tiny masses is a safety system to prevent floating point errors from creeping into the system, and to put a cap on the performance impact of temperature transfers across the map.

 

The best workaround I've generally used when dealing with conveyors is to control output at the conveyor loader to try and maintain 20kg packets, or just measure the temperature of the surrounding steam with a thermo sensor instead of a conveyor temp sensor. A tiny packet of very hot material isn't goign to have a significant impact on anything it moves through, and when it merges with a larger debris pile later, it'll cease being an issue.

On 3/2/2023 at 9:10 PM, ashridah said:

just measure the temperature of the surrounding steam with a thermo sensor instead of a conveyor temp sensor

Well, that's not always possible even with normal chunks. For example, in some volcano tamers I've used a pool with some cool liquid and a conveyor with hot materials going through it for a cooling with a big heat buffer. Some materials take their time to cool down (like Igneous Rock) and all that time liquid is much colder than actual rocks on the conveyor.

On 3/2/2023 at 9:10 PM, ashridah said:

it seems like the limitations on heat flow with tiny masses is a safety system to prevent floating point errors from creeping into the system, and to put a cap on the performance impact of temperature transfers across the map

Probably true but for consistency reasons it would probably be better to just have such small chunks to have an "infinite" heat transfer - set it's temperature to target one immediately while not actually affecting the other side. For example: a tiny 1g rock 500C hot in a tile of 1000kg of water 10C cold -> rock immediately cools down to 10C, water temperature not affected at all. This way tiny masses do not create an actual heat transfer, they only reflect the surrounding temperature.

On 3/2/2023 at 9:10 PM, ashridah said:

The limits on thermal conductivity (no transfer under 1g of material, 1degC of temperature change or 1DTU/s) has been documented in the wiki for several years. I expect if the devs considered it a bug, it'd have come up by now.

Well, ignoring tiny changes like 1C or 1 DTU/s is perfect, probably wouldn't be noticed by common players and has no impact on usual mechanics. But when it involves HUGE temperature difference and even potential state change that does not happen (solid CO2 grain in a pool of hot water is nonsense), meeting such cases makes it very confusing and more complicated to handle.

Also, bugs being present for years do not turn into features automatically 

17 hours ago, vladimmi said:

Well, that's not always possible even with normal chunks. For example, in some volcano tamers I've used a pool with some cool liquid and a conveyor with hot materials going through it for a cooling with a big heat buffer. Some materials take their time to cool down (like Igneous Rock) and all that time liquid is much colder than actual rocks on the conveyor.

Run the chunks through a highly conductive solid tile like steel tiles or diamond window tiles. That'll significantly improve the thermal transfer.

3 hours ago, ashridah said:

Run the chunks through a highly conductive solid tile like steel tiles or diamond window tiles. That'll significantly improve the thermal transfer.

You can't build anything (like shutoffs of thermo sensors) in a wall, so it will involve making a conveyor loop, etc. Anyway, looking for band-aids is not the point of this topic, after all. Said small chunks will not change their state even in diamond tiles.

I didn't suggest that you try to embed the conveyor sensors into the wall. I discussed specific the problem of hot metal or igneous rocks, combined with the relatively slow transfer of heat out of debris into gas, and a method of extracting heat from them more quickly. That allows you to use the temperature of steam as a reasonably useful indicator of the temperature of the debris on the conveyor, and when combined with some automation of the conveyor loader to control output, will ensure you don't end up with tiny packets of rock that won't change temperature on the conveyor line.

I'm saying this, because changing a mechanic that's been in place for several years because it's mildly inconvenient in some cases and has easy workarounds is unlikely to happen quickly. Especially when it seems highly likely to me that the mechanic exists to prevent other bugs in the simulation that result in much worse behavior.