Tower Coolers(bong)

[fart_plume]

Ok guys this thread is for discussing tower coolers.

First people need to know is they work by evaporative action and can drop the coolant temp down to the coolants dew point. This is sometimes as much as 30*F below abient temp. Think of it as a poor man's phase change unit,lol.

Here's and cad drawing of my current tower design:

 

[fart_plume]

so no one with any comments or questions?

 

[h3llb3nd4]

yeah I have 1, what is it used for?

 

[DrPepper]

How big are these things in practice ?

I've never seen one.

 

[Steevo]

Are you referring to a open waterjet system cooling athe closed loop, or a totally open loop?


I personally have been wanting to do a custom ammonia loop for cooling.

 

[DaMulta]

So does the fluid come out the top?


ammonia to make 100%(pure ammonia) go get some dry ice a big block of it then pour your ammonia on top of it. Be sure to do this out side because it will eat all the air around it.....'

 

[fart_plume]

Tower coolers are open loops they use evaporation to achieve below amient temps.

As far as size they range from 18 inches tall to, well I'll put it this way you know those familar towers you see in pictures of nuclear power plants? Those are tower coolers. They are also used to cool large commercial buildings.

As far as using ammonia for one of these systems I wouldn't advise it, Even outside it can deplete the immediate area of oxygen and be lethal.

No the fluid shouldn't come out the top, other than water vapor from the evaporation process

 

[DaMulta]

Commercail buildings use the fluid like this because it gets hot and cold.

I forget how to make it hot again tho..... maybe the evaporation is the hot? They used this system at the old Amoco research building which is now the OU Medical University.



Yes ammonia is very dangerous in this manner. Only reason I know how to make 100% is because it's one way to make the way of the BOMB(literally) dope and can blow up in your face in a sec. My friends dad in HS almost died several times making 100% because of it eating the oxygen out in his immediate area....


What part of Ok you from seeing that I'm from Oklahoma too.


vapor pipes for weed work in a total different way Redrider lol

 

[DaMulta]

Xtreme Refugee get a title Fit all of them

 

[DaMulta]

Custom Title to proclaim you don't have a forum anymore ??

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1292969&postcount=24


It will be back

They switched to a OSX server it appears and are having trouble getting the data moved over. There was also a note that the power went out when the transfer was going over and keeps erroring out. I think they are getting close tho....

 

[fart_plume]

DaMulta I'm in Cushing if you know where that is, if not It's about 30 miles weat of Stillwater.

Fitseries3 W1zzard offer those of us from XS the custom title since our home forum server got taken out by a power outage. The owner has purchased a brand new server out of his own pocket to replace the downed unit and is in process of restoring the forum. Since Xs has been online for nearly ten years and has 100,000 members restoring that amount of data takes time, aside from having to wait on the new server to arrive(which it has and is in process of be setup)

 

[chooky]

I used a bong on my oil PC until my blower broke so I put the pump in our pool.

I started off with a 120mm case fan but found this did not move enough air but it was quiet.

I added some of this cool cell material which increased the surface area in the tube.

I then got this blower out of a car wreck. It blew a lot of air but was noisy.

My bong could get the water down to 3C degrees below ambient. I didn't like it though because it was noisy, I had to top the water up daily because it evaporated 1 to 2 litres/day and I had to clean it out every couple of weeks.

If I had to go back to evaporative cooling I think I would get a large block of the cool cell material and a household box fan. This would give a bigger surface area and the fan would be cheap and quiet.

 

[Fitseries3]

i liked the idea of the bong until i saw the PVC prices at my local stores.

 

[DaMulta]

ah you live in the pipe line city.

I live in Coweta outside of Broken Arrow.

 

[fart_plume]

well I'm going to use a vantec 80mm tornado on the top of the tower instead of the typical forced draft I'm designing for an induced draft system. This along with the designed in venturi will create a low pressure zone withing the tower promoting more efficient evaporation.

 

[fart_plume]

Ya, the pipeline cross roads of America, the place that when we went to Iraq The head moron announced to the world as a potential target alterting any terrorists to this town's very exsistance.(Hell I had never even heard of this town till I moved here).

 

[DaMulta]

In Tulsa we are because of the Military data banks/top secret air force base/net work tree hub engineer fix the problems headquarters.

My city would be one of the places a Nuke would drop
---

I wonder if this would work well in a bong cooler

 

[fart_plume]

It was one of the things I had a thread on was to find a coolant that could possible go below freezing temps will out killing the operator, so far pretty much everything is just to bloody hazardous.

How ever saltwater has a freeze point of 26*F, downside is that it would corrode any metal in your loop in a heartbeat...........

 

[erocker]

So now the story has changed from upgrading to SSD's, to being burned up by a power outage...

This is like a "fishing story" it's gets bigger and bigger with time...

Let's keep on topic please.

 

[RedRaider]

Let's keep on topic please.

yes sir.

 

[Binge]

Seems like a great idea, but I'll have to do some reading to really understand. Keep it up fart plume.

 

[chooky]

I thought about adding something to the water to make it colder. The only thing I could think of that was cheap, because it evaporates you will use a lot of it, was methylated spirits but I never got around to trying it. The most important attributes of a good bong are surface area and air volume/velocity.

 

[sneekypeet]

so no one with any comments or questions?

I have one.

With a bong style cooler you usually drop water from the top and it cools as it falls to the collection pool or res.

With your set up I see no way in the design to keep the cooled water from just dropping back into the already heated water of the res. Any way you plan to collect the cooled water prior to it returning to the pool the jet is taking from?

 

[h3llb3nd4]

instead of letting the pipe go straight up and collect dirt in superspeed why don't we do this?vv

sorry about my paint skillz

 

[fart_plume]

instead of letting the pipe go straight up and collect dirt in superspeed why don't we do this?vv
http://img.techpowerup.org/090404/tube.jpg
sorry about my paint skillz

ok, I see the problem here . You have the airflow going the wrong direction the air flows out the top of the tower.

generally the air comes in over the top of the surface of the cold water in the res and is funneled up the tower taking the heat from the water traveling through the tower.

My design is different than most people's in that They use a shower head at the top of the tower, spraying down. I'm using a fountain nozzle and spraying the water up the tower and letting it fall back down the tower, effectively doubling the time the coolant is in tower.

For general reference a tower cooler can remove 1,000 btu of heat per pound of water per minute. Water wieghs 8lbs to the gallon, so 1 gallon of water can remove 8,000 btu of heat per minute.