Best materials for pipes and vents?

[Tregrenos]

Specifically, the Radiant and Insulated piping. Which has the best heat transfer and heat containment short of endgame materials like literal Insulation? I originally thought Aluminum was the best option for heat transfer in the earlier game, but after watching the below video I'm unsure. Is the video below still accurate?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2gCD4haGWQ

[Ender's games]

Sort of late game materials, if I'm not mistaken the best materials are wolframite for radiant and ceramic for insulated.

[Angpaur]

That test makes zero sense, because it doesn't take into account a heat capacity of the materials. I wouldn't use it for any reference.

To test conductivity of pipes you could build a one segment of the pipe in a hot liquid, continue to preheat both the liquid and pipe to same temperature and then let a one packet of other liquid go through that pipe and check how much rises temperature of the packet inside pipe after it pass the hot section. This can give you idea how much heat per second materials can transfer.

[fractalgem]

Aluminum and wolframite give you the fastest heat transfer, which is all that matters if there's constantly a packet in the pipe.

Usually.

Heat capacity matters a bit if you want a liiitle biiit of stabalization, such as with Liquid Hydrogen production, where it can maybe help to avoid accidentally freezing all your hydrogen.

But generally, wolframite or aluminum is the way to go for things requiring absolutely maximal heat transfer in a small area; of course, if you have a LARGE cooling system, then even plain stone pipes or whatever metal you have volcanoes for will do just fine.

For insulated, I forget which common rock has the lowest transfer rate. Ceramic is the best mid game material, however, and of course Insulation itself is the best late game material for low transfer rate.

[cswiger]

Use igneous rock for insulated pipes if you don't have enough ceramic handy.

[Tregrenos]

Thanks for the replies. I've a habit of making my facility into a tower structure and will see how to best contain and maintain heat with a cooling system. It takes so long to get everything together to build the cooling system that usually by the time I'm done with it I'm burned out of the game and by the time I get back to it I'll wanna restart because some big update comes along. Doesn't help that Carnivore and Locavore are time-sensitive and to keep those from becoming blacklisted I need to spend a large portion of the early game focusing on them.

[esaujohn282]

I wonder why klei has never explained why you need metal ore for radiant gas pipes, but refined metal for radiant liquid pipes.

[KMF-G]

Originally posted by esaujohn282:

I wonder why klei has never explained why you need metal ore for radiant gas pipes, but refined metal for radiant liquid pipes.

Because Gas pipes carry 1Kg while being bigger diameter and Liquid pipes carry 10 times more in smaller, but much denser pipes. 10 times difference in pressure and moving liquid instead of gases.

That is just my 2 pences.