Evaporative Cooling

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Limp Gawd
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Sep 2, 2010
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Curious if there is any extreme cooling guys around? I was thinking about messing around with some extreme cooling again. Think I might make another evaporator cooling tower, and maybe experiment with some new methods, and components. Just wondering if any HARD members have played around with it. Doesn't seem like to many extreme cooling junkies here, just thought I would ask.

Let me know your past experience with it, anything you learned along the way.

Stay tuned over the next month or two, for updates:)
 
I have been out of the extreme cooling loop for a few months now but go pretty into for awhile. I loved my phase change unit, so great to bench without to worries of LN2 and Dice of filling the pot, controlling temps, buying ln2/dice. I had my unit built for me and it was for a caseless rig so sounds like it was a little different from what you have planned but good luck!
 
I just like messing around with it, and evaporative cooling is efficient and fun to do, if it is done right :)

That chiller looked great, thats the kind of stuff I used to do for a living refrigeration... I just wanted something in the man cave (office) that was a operationally cheap alternative to cool my system, function as a piece of art and be the topic of discussion.

In case your not aware of what evaporative cooling is, and don't really feel like googling it. It is the process that occurs everyday when you take a shower. The water exiting the shower head is hot, but by the time, it falls to the floor of the shower it has lost a lot of that heat. If done right, evaporative cooling can give you temps below ambient temperature, without the hassles or expense of running a compressor for chilled water, or chilling plates, or other mechanical means. And all your really running is an extra case fan or two. And as I said before, its an attention grabber when you have this 6-8' 4" tube in your room with running colored water in it :)
 
Can you link any DIY stuff on this? I'd be interested in messing around with it.

I'm somewhat familiar with phase and LN2, etc, but not this.
 
Well THIS was a good starting point when I was looking into it.

And if you look around, you will find a lot more. I just like it cause its fun building them, relatively cheap, and work great.
 
Its cleverly dubbed the "bong" chiller on some sites...
If i had the space id do it :)
 
only problems with having water open to the air are:

evaporation- you will need to top off the resevoir frequently (weekly at least) and your room will be considerably more humid while using it.

contamination- you need to be careful to avoid growing colonies of legionella or other nasty organisms that like to grow in warm, wet and dark conditions. water droplets containing legionella can be carried a considerable distance, and if they get in your can of soda or you breathe them in, bad news. you can combat this with a UV lamp somewhere in the loop, or with chemicals.
 
contamination- you need to be careful to avoid growing colonies of legionella or other nasty organisms that like to grow in warm, wet and dark conditions. water droplets containing legionella can be carried a considerable distance, and if they get in your can of soda or you breathe them in, bad news. you can combat this with a UV lamp somewhere in the loop, or with chemicals.

Anyone know if a couple of those silver loop kill coils (like these) work to keep down organisms? I'd guess you'd need enough silver to keep all that water clean, if it would work at all...
 
silver would probably work to kill bacteria and microorganisms, however there isnt any data anywhere regarding how much you would need to use, or the amount of surface area you would need to keep X-amount of water disinfected. its still not entirely known why silver even has disinfectant properties, and there is nothing that i can find about what specific organisms silver is effective against. it just has "anti-microbial properties".

silver is sort of a passive disinfectant, and requires surface area so that the silver ions can migrate away from the surface. meaning a screen or thin wire coiled up would work better then a solid silver bar of the same weight. lack of any concrete data about how to use it and what it is effective on is the reason i would prefer to use a UV light in a setup like that. in a closed loop where contamination isnt constantly being introduced, a small killcoil will be fine at keeping slime and algea in check. but in a cooling tower type setup with a much higher bacterial load, and possibility of exposing humans to some nasty organisms, i would prefer a proven method of decontamination.

there is plenty of data about the effectiveness of UV to disinfect water. there is data on how well different wavelengths penetrate different depths of water and the type of power and spectrum you need to decontaminate a specific amount of water or flow rate.
 
I suppose the only thing left to do is experiment. I did some digging, and found that silver ionizers are used to treat both water lines in buildings and water in industrial cooling towers. Places like this sell systems that you place in-line with a water pipe to release ions into fountains, spas, and other open-air water environments. Trouble is, most of them are for large installations, of many hundreds or thousands of gallons. That's a lot more than the 1-2 gallons I expect to use in a small tower.

Research shows that you need something like 40 micrograms/liter of silver ions, and 400 micrograms/liter of copper. I don't know how fast copper and silver will ionize in water though. It obviously is fast enough to work in the small amounts of water present in most cooling loops, since the kill strips work. I'm guessing the copper in the radiators and the water blocks provides more than enough surface area.

What volume of liquid typically is contained in a normal cooling loop + reservoir?

I'll probably just build a cooling tower, and add silver kill-strips and see if I get biofilms or not.
 
If you use distilled water, food safe glycol, or some other type of PC anti-bacterial coolant, you will not have a problem with legionaries. If you do use water, frequent water changes and flushing the system once in a while will take care of it. Yes you have to be careful there are some down falls to evaporative cooling. Make sure you just do your homework thats all.

My last "bong" I had some food safe glycol around and mixed with plain H2O, and never had any problems.
 
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