Crucible cooling down

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1

I have always understood crucibles to cool down at a fixed rate of K/s when no heat is being added, and if any heat is being added, then the heat is added to the total mass of the crucible plus its contents and divided by that mass to come up with the new temperature. I have been using a large steel crucible for some weeks now enjoying this effect by using a fluidized bed invar burning box to heat it up to melt the contents, then switch to a regular invar burner to very gently continue to warm it, mostly just to stop it from cooling off while adding as little additional temperature as possible. Tonight I did a double batch of 140 magnetite + 30 carbon => iron, let it heat up to 2011 to become wrought, then added 40 nickel, let it get back to 2011 to be sure that all of the nickle had merged with the wrought to form 120 invar, then added 10 manganese and chromium to make 90 stainless steel and leave the remaining 90 invar to pour out as invar.

I opened the 6 hoppered redstone controlled auto pouring molds and switched from the fluidized bed to the regular burning box to keep it from cooling down and the temperature continued to drop. Eventually all of the invar poured out just as the temperature fell to 1940 so the stainless solidified. It sat there bouncing between 1939 and 1940 before I lit the fluidized bed burner again to get it back up and pour out the stainless.

Why did the temperature continue to drop despite adding 16 HU/t to the crucible?

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2

Simple, you need to add enough Energy to increase the total Temperature by 1 Kelvin every 100 ticks.

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3

So the cutoff is not 0 vs !0 input, but rather that there is a 1K increase every 5 seconds, and if not, then it is treated as if no heat were being applied? Weird… I wonder why I have not seen that effect before tonight. Also, why did it stop dropping at 1940?

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4

I guess because some of the molten metal exited the crucible so that it actually managed to increase temperature slowly again.

The Cooldown gets applied if no Energy to Temperature conversion happens for 100 Ticks.

Edit and then -1 once every 10 ticks, this also means that if you increase it every 105 ticks, that you get a solid 0 temperature change.

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5

All of the invar had finished pouring out though so nothing new was being poured since the stainless that remained was solid.

Ahh, so it’s just a coincidence that the last of the invar poured out just as the temperature hit 1940 and with the reduced mass and hanging right on the edge of 1 K every 105 ticks, it kept going up one, then down one… I see… and I guess the heat added each tick is added to an accumulator until it gets to be enough to add 1K so that’s possible. Whew!

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6

Exactly like that ^^

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