Timeline for Merfolk sword. Would it work?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
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| Oct 8, 2020 at 19:41 | comment | added | Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin | In hydrostatic / zero G situations water is a bad thermal conductor. But convection + high thermal capacity makes it very good at moving heat, which you can say is why we use it for cooking. Water+steam combo can be even better at heat transfer by taking heat for vaporization in one place and releasing heat from condensation in another (which is used in "heat pipes" to move heat in laptops). What all this means for the sword, I'm not sure :-). But lots of steam forming underwater will likely to be pressurized, thus it can be super-hot (significantly over 100ºC), which makes for bad burns. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 21:31 | history | edited | John | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2020 at 21:25 | history | edited | John | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2020 at 21:22 | comment | added | John | @ITAlex that is specific heat which is a very different thing than thermal conductivity. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 21:18 | history | edited | John | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2020 at 21:14 | comment | added | John | @Renan we use water for quenching precisely BECAUSE it has extremely good thermal conductivity it cools the metal quickly. That is also the reason you do NOT use it for high carbon steel it will cool it too quickly causing it to become brittle. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 18:39 | comment | added | Zeiss Ikon | What water does have that makes this a problem is much higher thermal conductivity than air -- and a genuinely immense specific heat and latent heat of vaporization. It takes more energy to boil off 100C water at standard pressure than it does to heat the same mass of water from 0C to 100C (which in itself is one of the highest figures of all known materials). Also, you might have missed that the character is immune to heat, as is the material of the sword. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 18:13 | comment | added | IT Alex | @Renan and why water takes quite a long time to freeze in winter. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 17:39 | comment | added | The Square-Cube Law | Water is not a very good thermal conductor, it is quite the opposite instead. That's why we use it to quench fire. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 16:58 | history | answered | John | CC BY-SA 4.0 |