Heat transfer between Abyssalite and liquids is confusing

Quote

abyssalite has 0 thermal conductivity

This is not correct. Abyssalite has a Thermal Conductivity of 0.00001; and when it interacts with another material such as crude oil, which has a high thermal conductivity, the total thermal conductivity for the system is geometric mean of the two.

The situation where the oil and petroleum do not heat up any further is likely one of the edge cases explained in the wiki:

https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Thermal_Conductivity

2 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

This is not correct. Abyssalite has a Thermal Conductivity of 0.00001; and when it interacts with another material such as crude oil, which has a high thermal conductivity, the total thermal conductivity for the system is geometric mean of the two.

The situation where the oil and petroleum do not heat up any further is likely one of the edge cases explained in the wiki:

https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Thermal_Conductivity

@yoakenashi Thanks for the reply! I'll update the information above... I had thought there was a bug in the heat transfer, but it seems likely that it's working as intended (or at least according to the math on the page you linked). 

I went into debug mode and did some sim-stepping... and realized that the drywall was mucking with the test. I rebuilt the test without it and it's behaving more as expected (based on the math you linked me).

The heat transfer with the new tests isn't as fast as before (it takes dozens of sim steps before the oil is heated enough to convert to petroleum, and it no longer flashes to sour gas (drywall)).

I was going to try to replicate the math... but it happens over a lot of updates and the interactions are probably too complicated to reasonably do by hand.  Eyeballing it, it seems like the first few sim updates are transferring about the amount of heat energy that would be expected.

Regardless of whether this is intended or not, behaviorally I think it's odd or at least unclear based on the in-game tooltips. I'll update the bug accordingly!

Edited February 18, 2020 by KPanda

You don't need any artificial tests here. Just on a regular map there are usually 1-3 areas in the oil biome where the upper layer of absyssalite is super hot and boils to the oil to petroleum and sometimes even straight to sour gas. If anything I'd consider the weird abyssalite barrier generation a bug

Read more about the issue here

TL;DR if a hot material can cause a 5kg of a material next to it to phase change upwards, it will, heating the other material and cooling down by itself. Thermal conductivity is completely ignored for this interaction.