Very low heat conduction in liquid pipes

[Coolthulhu]

I wanted to upgrade my "passive" (no thermo regulators) CO2 liquefier. Most (ie. all) liquefier designs I've seen only use gas pipes for cooling, but liquid pipes can coexist with them and could be used for extra boost.

The best liquid I found was chlorine: with dew point around -35 degrees Celsius and freezing point near -100, it fits the range for CO2 pretty well and also won't cause trouble with wheezeworts. The 0.008 conductivity is terrible, but 10kg of chlorine in a wolframite pipe (and not just granite gas pipe) should cause the cooling to happen faster, right?

10kg of chlorine in a wolframite pipe affects pipe's temperature less than <2kg of CO2 outside the pipe. CO2 has ~2 times the heat conductivity of chlorine, but that's 5 times as much chlorine in contact with the pipe (even assuming the pipe has larger surface on the outside).

The chlorine didn't heat up much either, so it's not like any temperature change was misplaced, just that transfer was as slow as 0.008 conductivity suggests, not as 0.008 conductivity times 10kg/1 pipe-tile could. I'm no expert on thermodynamics, but to me, the latter sounds more correct (say, interpolate from 0 conductivity of vacuum).

 

It seems that heat conduction doesn't depend on mass much, at least inside pipes. Intuitively, it would mean that the "packet" of liquid fills the whole pipe segment and the only thing that changes is pressure.

I'd also expect it to affect other methods of heat transfer, such as dupes walking through water (I'd expect full immersion and stepping in puddles to be similar here), small packets of hydrogen causing noticeable cooling for dupes and so on.

[Kasuha]

59 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

It seems that heat conduction doesn't depend on mass much, at least inside pipes.

Yeah that appears to be the case. There was a thread where people were even looking into the code to find and confirm that. 

I really wish devs fixed it, although many bases will probably "explode" after that change.