Ice, boiling and steam#

Liquids with a temperature: water that freezes into floating ice, boils on a hot plate or skates on its own vapour, and evaporates into steam that condenses in cold air.

Ice cubes in water: they plunge, bob up and float a tenth out of the water.

Boiling pot: bubble streams from the hot bottom, steam clouding above.

Ice and steam presets#

Ice and steam preset	Size	Notes
Ice cubes in water	4 cm cubes	Freezer cubes dropped into room-temperature water: they plunge trailing bubbles, bob up and float a tenth out of the water, clear rims and milky cores
Ice melting	4 cm cubes, time-lapse	Cubes standing in a tray of warm water, heat sped up 40 times: their edges round off, they shrink and settle into their meltwater, wet and glossy
Pond freezing over	1.6 m pond	A frosty night as a time-lapse (a second is 50 minutes): in a hollow of frozen earth, clear ice creeps out from the banks and rocks, joins up and thickens, stilling the ripples, over water that stays above freezing
Water on dry ice	40 cm slab	Water poured onto a -78 °C slab: it freezes where it lands into a growing mound of white, rimed ice
Boiling pot	20 cm pot	A rolling boil: bubble streams from the hot bottom, bursting bubbles spitting drops, steam rising and clouding in the kitchen air
Water on hot steel	150 °C and 300 °C	Water splashed on two plates: on the cooler one it boils where it lands, sizzling and steaming; on the hotter one (past the Leidenfrost point) it glides on its own vapour and lasts far longer
Red-hot steel quenched	7 cm ball at 950 °C	A glowing steel ball dropped into a tank of cold water: a film of steam holds the water off it, then the water boils hard against it and steam pours off, its glow fading as the water takes its heat
Hot pool in frost	2 m pool	40 °C water in -12 °C air: evaporation that the cold air cannot hold condenses into a fog rising off the whole surface
Boiling water into -30 °C air	5 litres	Boiling water flung into bitter cold: the spray evaporates as it flies into a roaring cloud of ice fog

Heat and phase changes#

Tick Liquid › Heat and phase changes and the liquid has a temperature, with the real heat capacities and latent heats of water (every particle carries its enthalpy, so it knows both how hot it is and how much of it is frozen). Set Liquid temperature, the Air temperature and humidity round it, the Ground temperature (also the closed walls and the footage's surfaces), a temperature on each collider (Heat › Temperature: a hot plate, a stove, a block of dry ice; the object warms and cools with what the water takes from it, unless it Keeps its temperature: objects' heat) and, if a source pours something else, its own (Heat › Own temperature: boiling water, iced water; below freezing a source pours ice). Heat moves through the liquid by conduction and by the flow's churning, and in and out of it at the air (convection, radiation, evaporation), at solids and at fire and lava in the same box, each at its physical rate.

Ice#

Water freezes where it loses heat: onto cold surfaces, at the top of a pond on a frosty night (water is densest at 4 °C, so the pond turns over until then and freezes from the top). Still water can cool below freezing without freezing (Supercooling, advanced) until something seeds it: ice next to it, a surface, or supercooling past what it holds, then dendrites race through it and it flashes to slush. Frozen liquid moves as solid pieces: connected ice is one rigid body that falls, floats with a tenth of itself out of the water (ice is 917 kg/m³), tips, drifts and rolls, and ice frozen onto a surface below freezing stays put. It melts back as heat reaches it. Ice keeps its edges in the render (no smoothing, no ripples), catches the light on the facets of its crystals, and is clear where it froze slowly and milky where it froze fast (drops, spray, slush, the last-frozen core of a freezer cube); left below freezing it grows white rime and feathers of hoarfrost, melting it is wet and glossy (Liquid look › Frost, Ice cloudiness).

Pond freezing over, as a time-lapse: clear ice creeps out from the banks and joins up.

Water on dry ice: it freezes where it lands into a mound of white, rimed ice.

Boiling#

Past the boiling point the extra heat boils water off. A hot surface boils it the way water boils: nucleate boiling up to the critical heat flux (bubbles rising in streams from fixed spots, a rolling boil, spitting drops where they burst), the violent transition regime, and past the Leidenfrost point (about 210 °C) film boiling, where the water rides on a cushion of its own vapour, glides and skates across the surface instead of wetting it, and boils off far more slowly. Steam bubbles (Steam bubble size) rise at their real speed, zigzag, grow in boiling water and collapse in cooler water (the crackle before a kettle boils, heating it), and lift the liquid around them as they rise.

Evaporation#

Water evaporates into air drier than it is, at the rate its temperature, the air's humidity and the wind allow, and cools as it does (hot water loses most of its heat this way); humid air on cold water condenses onto it instead. Spray and thin sheets, with their large surface, evaporate far faster than a pool. Wet ground dries at the rate a film of water on it evaporates, in seconds on a hot plate. Real evaporation is slow: a puddle takes hours.

Boiling water flung into -30 °C air: the spray evaporates into a roaring cloud of ice fog.

Steam#

With Domain › Simulation: Fire and liquid the box's gas is the air round the liquid: the vapour the liquid gives off goes into it, where it condenses into visible steam as it cools (clear right over boiling water, clouding as it rises; a fog rising off a hot pool on a frosty morning; a cloud of ice fog from boiling water flung into -30 °C air), and the gas's own heat (flames) boils and dries the water. Without fire the box then simply carries air and steam. Adding a Hot plate to a liquid scene, or water to a scene with something hotter than the boiling point in it, makes it a fire-and-liquid scene for this.

Time and heat speed-up#

Heat moves at its real speed: a pond takes hours to freeze and an ice cube many minutes to melt in a drink. Heat speed-up makes only the heat flow faster, as in a time-lapse, while the liquid still moves at its real speed (and so does the mixing its flow does: a still pond under its ice stays still, with its warmer water at the bottom).

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