phase change cooler

[heedoyiu]

basicly how hard is it to build one? my water cooler has a condenser and some other stuff i was thinking about just moddin it a bit to use for my comp. has anybody built one before?

 

[Calin]

You need something that is liquid at ambient temperature and gas at heat sink temperature. As these liquids are pretty hard to come by, in almost every case they "play" with pressure:
CO2 is gas at normal pressure. However, compress it and at some tens of atmospheres (let's say 200psi or something) become a liquid.
The refrigerators used freons (chlorofluorocarbons something) that were compressed (and heated in the process), moved on the refrigerator's radiator (the black grille on the back) where they cool and stay at the same pressure. The liquid CFC now moves inside the refrigerator, and on the vaporizer where it enters the low pressure circuit, expands its volume and cools itself (and the surrounding area).

The simplest way to make a phase change cooler would be to blow CO2 from a high pressure tank over the heat sink. For a closed-circuit system, put your computer in the freezer

 

[Gibsons]

You might have better luck in Cases and Cooling.

 

[iwantanewcomputer]

Originally posted by: Gibsons
You might have better luck in Cases and Cooling.

You might have better luck buying one...seriously the chems are toxic and the condensers/exaporators have got to be hard to put together

 

[CycloWizard]

Sounds like you're confusing the radiator in your current setup with a condenser. The design of heat exchangers for latent heat transfer (phase change) and sensible heat transfer (temperature change) are drastically different. Phase change systems are extremely difficult to design, and I very much doubt that you can perform any sort of simple mod to change your existing system to a phase change system.

 

[Calin]

Probably it is called condenser and not radiator. However, it is the only part of a refrigerator that becomes warm (or hot for those old units that don't have a compressor), so I called it radiator as it radiates away heat
Sorry for the misunderstanding

 

[heedoyiu]

ok thanks

 

[ZeroNine8]

First, your typical water cooling setup is not designed to handle vapor, so you would have to run some pretty significant mods to get it to work.

Many solvents (acetone, heptane, etc.) and some alcohols will function well as they hover around the liquid/vapor line at room/CPU heat sink temps, however the fire danger of these when heated and kept near power supplies makes that a concern. The vapor from solvents is also not a good thing to be inhaling.

Essentially, you want to keep enough liquid on your heat source to continually boil off, and you need to effectively remove the vapor to your condenser where it is cooled and returned to liquid form. If your heat source dries up, you will overheat, and if you end up pumping liquid all the way through your circuit, you lose the huge advantage of phase-change cooling.

It can be done, and it's not really that technically challenging of a concept, but the practicalities of doing it inside a CPU case with home-built equipment or modded water cooling hardware might be a bit much.