Invested and fireproofing

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

So I feel like I remember reading that shardplate protects the wearer from fire as well as lightning. Is that the God metal itself or just the massive amount of investiture it is made of?  

I had this dream where there was a fire and I was trying to get through this house. I must have been the 9th heightening because I was commanding the sheets to smoother the fire on the ground around this bed with just my voice.  So automatically an A tier dream.  

But the sheets started to smoke.  If future dreams find me smothering fires with awakened blankets should I just will more breath into them to make them fireproof or is that a shardplate specific thing?  

[Argenti he/him]

32 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

So I feel like I remember reading that shardplate protects the wearer from fire as well as lightning. Is that the God metal itself or just the massive amount of investiture it is made of?  

I had this dream where there was a fire and I was trying to get through this house. I must have been the 9th heightening because I was commanding the sheets to smoother the fire on the ground around this bed with just my voice.  So automatically an A tier dream.  

But the sheets started to smoke.  If future dreams find me smothering fires with awakened blankets should I just will more breath into them to make them fireproof or is that a shardplate specific thing?  

So, the lighting is becasue it's a giant metal hunk; the lightning goes around you rather than through. It protects you from heat, since it's airtight, and won't melt. 
Invested things probably have a harder time burning, since X amount of investiture just makes things stronger. 
so maybe?

Edited January 5 by Argenti

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

If future dreams find me smothering fires with awakened blankets should I just will more breath into them to make them fireproof or is that a shardplate specific thing?

This is answered, at least in part, in the Secret projects.
 

Spoiler

We know just being invested isn't quite enough

SP4 (TSM) Spoilers:

Spoiler

The Sunlight and heat certainly damaged Nomad while invested:

TSM Ch 1:

Spoiler

The sunlight reached him. An incredible, intense, burning light. Prisoners burst into flame, screaming.

Oh, storms, the knight shouts.

In that moment, the slack on the chain pulled tight. Nomad was yanked out of the sunlight, his skin screaming in agony, his clothing aflame.

But later, he devises methods of protection:

TSM Ch 47:

Spoiler

The suit of armor, designed to maintain temperature and life support for the person it protected, had been able to withstand even the sunlight’s terrible heat.

<snip>

 Not transparent this time, as that would defeat the purpose. A large piece of metal, reflective on the outside. When he’d encased himself in this in the maelstrom, he’d been protected from the bulk of the heat.

So, possibly specific to either Shards or godmetals?

 

[Duxredux he/him]

tl;dr Shardplate and Godmetals mess with a lot of rules, so my opinion is the jury is out until we see non-Godmetal heavily Invested objects dealing with heat loads. Read my research and meanderings below, but I don't think simply Investing a material necessarily equates to heat resistance. Also, Breaths are ridiculously expensive, so using them as a flame retardant additive is probably a last-ditch desperate decision.

 

I haven't directly learned about this in school so I'm winging it, but there's a good bit of science surrounding what makes something fireproof. This includes things like the specific heat of the object, phase of matter, mass of the object, and environmental conditions with reactivity in mind.

• The specific heat is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of a given material 1 degree Celsius. It generally has to do with molecular structure and the state of the matter.
  • For example, from Wikipedia, "Liquid water has one of the highest specific heat capacities among common substances, about 4184 J⋅kg⁻¹⋅K⁻¹ at 20 °C; but that of ice, just below 0 °C, is only 2093 J⋅kg⁻¹⋅K⁻¹."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity
• The phase of matter determines if heat is conducted throughout the material via conduction or convection and affects specific heat.
  • If you intend the material to maintain structural integrity, then melting point has a role in here.
  • Something to note here is that Godmetals don't seem to follow normal phase changes. We had liquid, gaseous, and solid samples of Lerasium basically all in the same room at the Well of Ascension, so the phase change isn't related to heat most likely, though apparently the Mists evaporate in sunlight. That's still a bit odd.
• The mass of the object determines how much total heat can be absorbed before burning.
  • For example, even things that you normally wouldn't think of as flammable like steel can be burned in laboratory conditions with small samples. This is in essence what Wax was testing with his spectroscope with the various Godmetals. He couldn't even really melt small samples of Harmonium or Bavadinium, but could burn shavings.
• In terms of reactivity, mostly I'm talking combustion. Chemical reactions require a minimum activation energy in order to react and combustion is probably the best known one. The chemical formula for combustion loosely is CH + O2 -> CO2 + H2O, or hydrocarbons (like gasoline, wood, etc.. Basically organic material) added with oxygen reacts to produce carbon dioxide and water. Because combustion is an exothermic reaction and releases heat, it feeds back into the chemical reaction and allows other samples to react (i.e. catch fire). Where this plays into the environment is whether or not the material reacts with oxygen in the air for something like combustion.
  • We know of at least one case of a God(s)metal that is reactive, namely Harmonium. The activation energy for Harmonium reacting with water is at or below room temperature, though we wouldn't call this combustion in a typical sense.

 Shardplate gets weirder in the context of resistance to lightning. (WoB spoiler for length)

Spoiler

polaristar

So in Words of Radiance, at the end of the book, the singers in their Stormform can summon red lightning and it's revealed Shardplate can neutralize it. I was wondering, can Shardplate neutralize ALL electric discharges or just the "special" kind from Voidlight/voidspren powered from.

And if Shardplate can defend against lightning in general is their a maximum voltage/amperage before it loses effectiveness?

nagewaza

In my mind - the plate likely acts like a Faraday cage - essentially allowing the lightning to never have a path through the user's body (electricity moving through your body is how you get injured). This would assume that Shardplate is conductive.

If they jumped, then likely the lightning would again travel through the outside Shardplate metal and then to ground - again avoiding the human altogether..... That said, small aluminum airplanes have been known to have damage to wings from strikes. In the case of Shardplate, I doubt that thermal shock or melting temperature is an issue for the material.

Brandon Sanderson

This is along the lines of what I was thinking, though I'm not sure I have a maximum volt/amp answer handy.

polaristar

Was basically asking to find out if I can use Shardplate users against Electromaster characters on /r/whowouldwin

Brandon Sanderson

Then I give you an official, "Yes you can."

General Reddit 2018 (Sept. 10, 2018)

The weird part is that generally objects, particularly metals that are highly conductive electrically tend to be good conductors. If Shardplate is a good electrical conductor then it's unusual that it seems to be thermally insulative. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Conduction

With that as the setup, here's my inexpert thoughts and options:

• Perhaps Investiture added to an object either alters the specific heat or the "mass" of the object. You can have insanely Investiture-dense objects that can still be carried around in one hand like Nightblood. In this scenario the way Shardplate protects the wearer is by the property that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to raise the temperature of the material and it takes a long time for the heat to be transferred from the outside surface through the material to the inside surface. However if this was the case, then as long as the material remains in the same state (solid), then it should take the same energy rate to raise the temperature of Shardplate from ambient-temperature to body temperature when touched. This doesn't seem to be the case, or at least I've never noticed Shardplate being referred to as supernaturally cold. For that matter, I don't think the Bands of Mourning or Nightblood have been noted to be abnormally cold either. Physical durability is a different property than maintaining that tiny band of temperature that is comfortable for humans.
• Shardplate might just be special in that it actively and magically works to protect the wearer. We already know this because the visor selectively reacts to a Stormform's lighting attacks. Intent and whatever else Shardplate has going for it probably is actively trying to regulate internal temperature. I'm not sure where it's redirecting heat in extreme cases, as it can't just vent heat into a superheated environment, the energy needs somewhere to go. Heatsinks use convection-based heat transfer via air or liquid across a thermally conductive material with a large surface area to cool a target region, but that works because the air or liquid is generally colder than the material to be cooled. Also see above where what we need for Shardplate is for it to be a thermal resistor.
• With the case of Awakening cloth, the added Investiture would have to be doing something to the chemical reaction of combustion. Unless it's changing the very hydrocarbon molecules so that they do not react with oxygen, raising the activation energy for the reaction, or Intent mumbo jumbo I can't think of, this feels different than material durability. You can have incredibly strong materials that are also quite flammable.
• Hrm... As evidenced by Firesoul Ferrings, with the right ability or Intent, heat can be converted into Investiture. Maybe... Shardplate or Blades convert heat to Investiture and then offloads that Investiture into the Spiritual Realm when it gets dismissed? I dunno. I'm grasping at straws at this point.

Probably not what I should have been spending my time on while I'm sick, but hopefully someone pulls something from this. Shardplate breaks enough rules I'm putting it in it's own pile, and Nightblood or the Bands of Mourning don't seem like they have an insanely high specific heat capacity. Combustion of Awakened cloth is a separate matter, as it would imply adding Investiture changes chemical properties of hydrocarbons (which basically is what a lot of organic life is built out of, so... what 99% of Awakened objects are made out of). Any material engineers who know more about this than me?

At any rate, if I had to say something, I'm going to say that using Awakening blankets to smother a fire is a risky use of Breath. If you're trying to brute force saturate a blanket with enough Investiture to make it resistant to fire then that blanket costs more than your neighborhood, let alone your house. Have your mattress punch through the wall, have the blankets hoist you to the ground, something, but don't just throw Investiture at it unless you don't think you won't survive otherwise. That said, this is dream @Tamriel Wolfsbaine who was making decisions, so I guess this can be excused.

Edited January 5 by Duxredux