View Full Version : Evaporative cooling
blkexp98
08-20-2010, 07:08 AM
Have any of you used evaporative cooling along with your radiators I was curious how much effect it would have? You could even toss in a freezer pack when you needed it cooler. Anyway its just something ive thought about from time to time and wanted to see if anyone had tried it.
antiacid
08-20-2010, 07:24 AM
see the "search" button up top? It's right between "new posts" and "quick links". You'll see there's quite a bunch of people who've done worklogs of their evap setups ;)
NaeKuh
08-20-2010, 09:15 AM
now u talking a bong chiller?
or like a HWLABS RXN which evaporated from history without any more info?
blkexp98
08-20-2010, 09:21 AM
I was mainly thinking about keeping the normal watercooling radiaor but having water flood over and through it. That way your coolant loop is seperate. If you rigged some fans up so they wouldnt get wet you would see even more difference.
Anyway thats where i was going with this. The posts i looked at on the search werent quite what i was looking for.
If you mean sprayers like those on car radiators, that would be a bit cumbersome to set up for a PC and not very performant at all.
Real evap cooling has been done a lot already with bong coolers.
Ice packs work but they can only last that long [ ] and poof melted. Again they work well on cars when a few seconds of extra performance make the difference on a 1/4 mile, but on a PC for short term performance people use LN2 which is another form of evap cooling (direct phase change actually).
relttem
08-20-2010, 10:00 AM
the actually sell PCs that are cooled with spray cooling. It is a mess. I have also seen PCs for sale that are entirely submerged. Problem with ice packs aside from getting warm is condensation.
You are going to flow water thru the radiator where the air usually goes? Evaporative cooling depends on a lot of things. It takes a lot of energy to phase change water - you can look it up in a thermo book, enthalpy..(hfg at a certain temp). But, if your air is humid it won't work well at all, since the air that is going to be absorbing the evaporated moisture is already saturated. Ever seen a swamp cooler? They work great in the desert, but not in the tropics.
Is LN2 cooling by evaporating? I think it is just cold to begin with, and is evaporating just due to its boiling temp being so low. But, I am not positive.
Is LN2 cooling by evaporating? I think it is just cold to begin with, and is evaporating just due to its boiling temp being so low. But, I am not positive.
Actually the specific heat of LN2 is not that great at all, it being cold doesnt do much by itself. It's the actual latent heat of phase change that produces most of the cooling effect. So yeah technically it's evaporative cooling, but not the kind of evap cooling we're usually thinking about (= mist/spray cooling).