After reading a thread here on this forum, I decided to pursue alternative method of building a bong. The primary feature of this bong uses a vacuum to boil the liquid-coolant, to bring about our cooling effect.
My liquid-coolant chambers are nothing more than Pentek whole-house water filter housings. These can be readily obtained online in many locations. There are many options to choose from. Mine is the larger 20" tall model, with clear sumps.
I got my housings earlier this week. All I could do was grin as soon as I started looking at them. They're sooo BIG and absolutely BEAUTIFUL. They play the part of looking like plasma coolant chambers from some scifi show. Now let me state that these components are part of a much larger project, in which I'm building a cluster with five motherboards all inside of a Pelican 1780 Transport case. The idea is to create something that looks like it would have been used on Stargate SG-1. So I'm looking for a definite alien appearance here.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1428264
Now the one constraint in this design, is that everything must exist inside that case. Only the condenser or radiator will be mounted to the exterior. That's obviously necessary, since we have to dump the heat of the system outside. I mentioned a condenser, because I haven't decided on whether I will also be cooling my fluid with a Phase-Change system or not. But in this thread, I'm going to concentrate on the efficiency of the liquid-cooling loop using vacuum-induced boiling to release vapor and cool the liquid.
Now here's where I should point something out. The chief characteristic of this system, is the boiling of the liquid-coolant under a vacuum. But the means to produce boiling isn't limited to using low pressures. Boiling can also be easily achieved with ultrasonics, in the same way that ultrasonic humidifiers work. The major point here, is to get the fluid to boil. How, is irrelevant.
Others have tried using coolant-soaked wicks to produce evaporation by moving air across their surface. That is a fundamentally inefficient way of getting liquid to vapor-phase. One of the main reasons for this inefficiency is the ambient humidity the system operates in. Because of that inefficiency, a much larger (if not colossal) system must be built to get a lesser effect than using a vacuum.
The common technique of building what is essentially a swamp-cooler (with a bong), requires that air move over the surface of a fluid (aeration). But the ability of the air to capture and carry vapor away from the liquid is an indirect process. By definition, the area subject to evaporation by aeration, is significantly smaller than the entire volume of a fluid being caused to boil. In boiling, we're using cavitation within the fluid. The only difference here being that we're not adding heat to our system. We're dropping pressure to lower the boiling point.
So now, I will introduce you to the components of this system.
Shingoshi
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