i heard about these yesterday. has anyone thought of modifying a chargecooler with heat pipes?

http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml

could be an interesting project

 

i would, if i understood it

 

c'mon steve, just google a few things and you'll get it. you're a pretty clever bloke

 

Not before midday im not

 

Lots of computers are coming as standard with heat pipes.
I have one sitting on my CPU that takes the heat to a heat sink at the back of my case. Works really well
Use for a chargecooler sounds interesting,

 

Its basically an absorbtion fridge.....you would use the heat from the engine cooling system to power the charge cooling system.....you'd have the heat pipe system charged with amonia and site an evaporator the the induction air stream.....

Caravan fridges use absorbtion to enable you to have 2 sources of heat....LPG or an electric heater element 12V or 240V when you hook up.....

Is that right Nick?

 

sibster what you have described is an absorption (or sometimes called sorption) system that is much more complicated. it seems bizzare that the boat or caravan fridges can use calor gas to make a fridge work, but that's what they do.

a heat pipe is a much simpler device. it is just a pipe with a refrigerent encapsulated in it which allows them to conduct away much more heat than just a pipe.

as Ollie MK5 Turbo says, they are being used increasingly in computers to take heat out of the cpu, but their original use was to improve the efficiency of building dehumidifiers.

all that they do is conduct the heat away from a hot place to a colder place, but much more effectively than a simple pipe would do.

in a chargecooler application, i would envisage a heat exchanger filled with many columns of heat pipes, with the boost air passing over them. the tops of the heat pipes would go into a header tank type arrangement with cold water pumped through it, then a radiator to remove the heat from that water, much like a standard separate chargecooler system that are commonly used now.

the theory should be that it should work much more efficiently for a given volume.

 

will look at that later

 

i think that they may not work very well if there is a large difference in temperature between the boost air and the cooling water, but i'm not sure. it would need more research.

 

im sure it would work,, but the problem i see is the amount of heat (energy) that is being transmitted,, would need a hell of alot of heatpipes

wouldnt mind someone to try it out though,, good idea if packaging is difficult

 

I think its one of those ideas that looks great qualatitively but wont work quantatitively in the application you are on about.

 

Nick,

What do you propose to use as a refrigerant?

 

sibster i haven't looked it into enough to make a judgement on that. probably just water, but would depend on cost of others.

water is actually an amazing substance - very underrated.

 

If I'm reading that right, there is a similar thing fitted to aircraft. Fuel Cooled Oil Coolers (FCOC) or Air Cooled Oil Coolers (ACOC). The ACOC work just like a radiator: oil flows through the cooler with cold outside air passes through taking the heat with it. The FCOC works similar, but is sealed inside a fuel tank/cell and as the fuel is pumped through the tank/cell it passes around the cooler taking the heat from the oil which in turn heats up the fuel ready for combustion: also helping with that process.