crazy idea for you thinkers - evaporative cooling design

J

jamsomito

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Ok, so I'm probably not the first one to think of this. I work on HVAC systems for my job quite a bit, and the thought occurred to me while reviewing a cooling tower design. Why not make a smaller scale cooling tower for your PC water cooling loop? It would act as both a heat removal device for the PC, and a humidifier for the room (I use one anyway). Kill two birds with one stone. Here's a quick sketch of what I had in my head:

pcevaporativecooler.jpg


This evaporative cooler would have the potential to achieve temps lower than ambient sensible (dry bulb) temperatures, limited by the latent (wet bulb) temp of the room, which is obviously determined by the humidity content of the ambient air. If it's really humid, there would be little benefit, but if you live in a dry area or an area with dry days, the temperature difference could be significant.

The cool thing about this design is that you can use distilled water in the evaporation reservoir, so you wouldn't have too worry too much about bacteria build-up. You would have to fill it up every day with such a small reservoir too, but I think this is one of the benefits. As someone who uses my humidifier a lot, I could simply add water whenever I wanted my room humidified, or whenever I wanted lower CPU temps. Lots of flexibility.

This is more food for thought than anything. I'm curious to know what you think.
 
Cooling towers are a very important part of big AC systems.

I've actually made a small cooling tower back in my college days (ϕ300mm, height: 1m) and it worked pretty well.

The problem would be the size, how big would it need to be to actually be better than a 480mm radiator with lots of fans? So further heat transfer calculations and testing are required, but I think it's very possible that an "enthusiast" could build something like that... Heck I actually thought about building one some time ago, but it would take precious time... time that i don't have :(

pic:
owgfCo.gif
 
You would be cleaning that system out frequently, unless you could find some way of preventing algae buildup
 
Could work, you just have to bleach out the reservoir once in a while to prevent any bacterial contamination.

What I'm concerned with is how the fans would deal with the continuous elevated humidity. Would seem they would rust pretty quickly, or maybe short out from condensation.
 
Xeth said:
Could work, you just have to bleach out the reservoir once in a while to prevent any bacterial contamination.

What I'm concerned with is how the fans would deal with the continuous elevated humidity. Would seem they would rust pretty quickly, or maybe short out from condensation.
Click to expand...

luckily for us, cooling towers have been around for some time, there is plenty of information regarding those issues. ASHRAE has some good information, but there are also some other books that focus solely on cooling towers :)
 
leSLIe said:
luckily for us, cooling towers have been around for some time, there is plenty of information regarding those issues. ASHRAE has some good information, but there are also some other books that focus solely on cooling towers
Click to expand...

I was assuming he would use standard PC case fans, no need to get snippy :rolleyes:
 
Wow awesome responses so far.

I was thinking of standard PC rads and fans in the OP, but this is all hypothetically speaking anyway so if that's an issue you can make it as [H] as you want. :)
 
256 Watts of heat dissipation if you can evaporate 1 pound of water(16fl. oz.) in one hour. On days of low humidity I could get my i7 [email protected] ghz(200 watts) down 10f below ambient, on days of high humidity 1f below ambient.
Biocides, silver works well( i used colloidal silver) as well as bleach or alcohol.
 
spitter said:
256 Watts of heat dissipation if you can evaporate 1 pound of water(16fl. oz.) in one hour. On days of low humidity I could get my i7 [email protected] ghz(200 watts) down 10f below ambient, on days of high humidity 1f below ambient.
Biocides, silver works well( i used colloidal silver) as well as bleach or alcohol.
Click to expand...

you've actually made one? post pics!! :D
 
If you're dumping the evaporated water into your indoor air, I don't think you'd want biocides or bleach in it.

I ran into problems with a wicking humidifier. It needed to be cleaned CONSANTLY or it built up mildew and smelled terrible.

I think this would be effective, but a lot of work.
 
very nice stuff!!! :)

but what are those beer bottles doing there?
 
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