Temperature - Rise and Sink?

[AtomikRonin]

Does the game account for hot air rising and cold air sinking? Wondering if it's worth placing heat producing equipment higher in my base or simply relocate them outside of the core completely.

[Hedning]

I have heard different reports. Maybe it's something that has changed with different versions of the game. What I do know is that the effect if it exists is tiny and not something that matters. You may assume there is no convection due to heat.

The only real way to move heat around in your base is either using pipes or have the hot gas be of a different type than the surrounding gas, eg hot co2 will fall quite quickly through a base filled with o2.

[AquaX]

It does brothgar did a test on it a while back and it showed cold tends to spread down more and hot rises.

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by AquaX:

It does brothgar did a test on it a while back and it showed cold tends to spread down more and hot rises.

and i've noticed it myself as well, did some tests by using thermal exchange plates made of ice (just something to create instant cold air) and the cold did dissipate downward in the air. on surfaces those solid materials retained the cold and it slowly bled out both up and down a the wall though its hard to tell if down was faster due to thermal transfer or just the fact the ice water dripped down the entire thermal wall i built.

[BoNes]

I have seen the effect of cold falling and heat rising. At times, it can be quite pronounced. In one of my debug worlds (where I'd set the entire world to 2kg of oxygen) whenever I introduced hot/cold, it was very obvious that convection was taking place.

[Hedning]

I just tested it. Hot air tiles move up, while cold moves down. Both however spreads faster left and right.

Anyway in a real setting this will not have an effect. In a real setting you have vents that push the air and dupes running around consuming it. This breeze will overcome the effect from convection due to heat. Looking through all my save files I cannot see this effect in any of them.

Also it's not causing any pressure difference. Rather a hot tile below a cold tile will switch places. It won't push the cold tile.

[AtomikRonin]

Nice! Thanks for the input! So I'll add that to my base planning.

[Bone White]

If you're interested in making cold air go up, you might be interested in the Wheezewort Pump effect.

[AtomikRonin]

I've been able to get wheezeworts once so far. What's the effect?

[Hedning]

WW take in air from the bottom tile and outputs it in the top tile. This makes it sort of a pump. if placed in a narrow space it can start moving the air. It is much less practical now when your dupes have to have access to it.

To move large amounts of heat nothing can beat putting liquid in an infinite loop.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Personally I'd feel that steam turbines wouldn't work very well if hotter steam didn't rise and cooler steam falls. It's been my experience too that the hotter gasses will rise above the cooler gasses in the same layer. It takes time though.

[Hedning]

Steam turbines rely on steam rising above liquid water and heat conduction. If you need convection for your steam turbine to work then it won't.

[fractalgem]

I think the in-game steam turbines would still work very well with just convection spreading the heat out. Once they kick in the first time, they'd consume the gasses at the top and that would start the flow up for you. Unless you had more than a 5 tile gap between the aquatuners and the turbine, I wouldn't expect there to be any real problem.

[Hedning]

That pressure difference is caused by removing gas from the top and adding liquid (which turns into gas) at the bottom. It has nothing to do with temperature. If they removed the feature that hot gas rises it wouldn't make any difference to the steam turbine.

[fractalgem]

Originally posted by Hedning:

That pressure difference is caused by removing gas from the top and adding liquid (which turns into gas) at the bottom. It has nothing to do with temperature. If they removed the feature that hot gas rises it wouldn't make any difference to the steam turbine.

Exactly.