Nanofactory engineering/cooling
From Wise Nano
A subpage of Nanofactory engineering.
What's the lowest-mass cooling system that can handle 200 kW and can be built out of diamondoid?
Candidates:
Contents |
Thermionics
Very low mass and high density, according to Cool Chips. But not yet shipping product.
Sonic
Basically uses sound to compress a gas at one point in a tuned cavity and rarefy it at another point. Very simple. What's the working gas? What's the efficiency? Can it scale to 200 kW?
Peltier
I think this is also called "thermoelectric". This requires semiconductors, and it's not yet known whether diamondoid can build the right kind of semiconductors. The work function of graphite is different from diamond by a volt, and buckytubes have been observed acting as diodes. But this must stay speculative. Efficiency is probably also a concern.
Mechanical (compress/expand refrigerant)
It appears that a Stirling cycle cooler is very well suited to the task. It has only two moving parts (a piston and a valve), a cheap gaseous working fluid (hydrogen is best), high efficiency (approaches Carnot), and low mass.
This company has demonstrated a Stirling cooler for refrigeration with a Coefficient of Performance of 3. And they've built a 1-kg 40 watt model.
Given that the regenerator and balance mass can be water-filled, the piston can presumably be water-filled, and the structure is basically a low-pressure gas tank, it appears that building with diamondoid (~100 times as strong as steel) can reduce the dry (not water-filled) weight of the product by a factor of 1000 at least. This would allow cooling of 150 kW of energy with just over a kg of diamond.
See the Discussion page for background.
