Heat pipe
Heat pipe |
Recipe |
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+ + → | |
Total raw |
|
+ + |
Map color |
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Health |
200 |
Resistances |
Explosion: 0/30% |
Stack size |
50 |
Dimensions |
1×1 |
Maximum temperature |
1000 °C |
Mining time |
0.1 |
Prototype type |
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Internal name |
heat-pipe |
Required technologies |
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Produced by |
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The heat pipe can transport heat over longer distances and connect devices which produce and use heat. Currently this is limited to heat exchangers and nuclear reactors.
Heat pipes have a heat capacity of 1 MJ/°C. Thus, they can theoretically buffer 500 MJ of heat energy across their working range of 500°C to 1000°C, making them a space-efficient energy store. However, because temperature needs a drop of greater than 1 degree before it will "flow," you can't raise them all the way to 1000°C or drain them all the way to 500°C, so the practical energy capacity will depend on the layout.
As heat pipes rise in temperature, they will give off a very low-distance glow.
Heat pipe throughput
Heat pipes are acting very similarly to fluid pipes: they each hold an amount of heat energy and there is a limit to how much energy can go through each of them for a given duration.
For any heat pipe entity with one input connection on one side and one output connection on another, this entity with lower the temperature by 1 + (P / 15) °C
with P being the power going through this entity expressed in MW.
Since a nuclear power plant can have at most 500°C difference between the hottest (a nuclear reactor) and coldest (a heat exchanger) points of the system, that means that we can express the maximum length of a straight line of heat pipe as 500 / (1 + P/15)
.
For example let's take a single nuclear reactor outputting 40MW of heat power to a single line of heat pipes. The furthest that line can go is 500 / (1 + 40/15)
which is around 136 heat pipes long.
A nuclear reactor can also be used to transfer heat in a similar manner as a heat pipe, whether or not it's fueled. In this case, the reactor will drop the temperature by 1 + (P / 387) °C
, with P again being the power in MW going through the entity. Note that this is an approximation, the actual value measured is supposed to be 200000/517 or about 386.847.
That being said, the nuclear reactor entity is also much bigger, meaning that we must compare it to 5 lines of 5 heat pipes instead of just a single one. The nuclear reactor will thus lower the temperature 5 times less with near-zero power going through it, and nearly 26 times less when approaching infinite power, compared to those lines of heat pipes.
As an example, a single line of 100 nuclear reactors (or 500 tiles) will only lower the temperature by about 360°C while carrying 1GW.
History
- 0.17.67:
- Heat pipes (also in reactors and heat exchangers) glow with high temperatures.
- 0.15.11:
- Changed heat transfer mechanics, prior to this heat would flow better following the order of heat pipe placement
- 0.15.0:
- Introduced
See also