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3d printed cooler
- Thread starter Rob Hobbo
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2012
Fun project.
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2002
- Location
- The Empire State
Nice! I always like new inventions 
- Thread Starter
- #6
Something has been troubling me and I wonder if there may be some one on here who can help. As I stated this cooler performs much the same as my original ( maybe a little better ). It is far superior however in that it passes water over a larger area of heat pipe, the water resistance is a lot less, and because it is going across the pipes rather than along the length it does this faster. I have given this a bit of thought and maybe the heat pipe is maxed out. Let me explain: If you imagine a heat pipe air cooler with a fan attatched, as you turn up the fan, the cooling performance will increase but maybe you'll get to a point where increasing the speed of the fan further will not improve performance. At this point the speed of the evaporation and condensation within the pipe will have reached it's limit. Maybe, because water works so much better than air, it may have hit this limit in my cooler. It's just an idea. Maybe one of you guys can help.
Because of the thickness of the pipe, and lack of surface area, yes your cooling capacity is limited. You can actually calculate this out, but you need some temp gauges installed, and will need to do a LOT of measuring (which you may actually have available from your cad stuff).
Whats going on inside the plastic bits? Your video wasn't too clear on that. Are they just connected to the copper pipe?
Whats going on inside the plastic bits? Your video wasn't too clear on that. Are they just connected to the copper pipe?
- Thread Starter
- #8
Water is fed from the loop into the inlet manifold of the block.
From there it is then fed into a side tube.
It is then fed, evenly, into the centeral heat exchange tube ( which houses a condensor end of an heat pipe ) through 10 small feeder tubes.
It then flows around both sides of the heat pipe.
It then flows into the side tube on the opposite side through 10 small drain tubes.
from here it flows into the outlet manifold and back into the loop to be cooled by the radiator.
Before I stripped the fins off the air cooler in order to get the base and pipes I decided to test it for comparison. The cooler did ok considering it was a 95W cooler trying to cool a 125W cpu. With the blocks on and using water, however, it performed a whole lot better. It didn't, however, perform much better than my original water cooled heat pipe cooler even though the design was a lot better. This made me think that maybe I'd hit a wall.
From there it is then fed into a side tube.
It is then fed, evenly, into the centeral heat exchange tube ( which houses a condensor end of an heat pipe ) through 10 small feeder tubes.
It then flows around both sides of the heat pipe.
It then flows into the side tube on the opposite side through 10 small drain tubes.
from here it flows into the outlet manifold and back into the loop to be cooled by the radiator.
Before I stripped the fins off the air cooler in order to get the base and pipes I decided to test it for comparison. The cooler did ok considering it was a 95W cooler trying to cool a 125W cpu. With the blocks on and using water, however, it performed a whole lot better. It didn't, however, perform much better than my original water cooled heat pipe cooler even though the design was a lot better. This made me think that maybe I'd hit a wall.
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Perhaps consider leaving some fins around the pipes and in your chamber to increase surface area. In essence you are just cooling the heatpipes as it stands. If you have more area to get heat out of there, the more effective it should be.
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- Thread Starter
- #10
I must say I've really enjoyed this project and I've learned a few things. One of the supprising things I have learned is how you work out water resistance in a channel. I assumed that the resistance was inversely proportional to the cross sectional area of a pipe but it turns out that it's inversely proportional to the square of the cross sectional area. It's a little more complicated than that but what it means if you halve the area the resistance is x4 if you divide the area by three the resistance is x9. Any way using the resistance formulas I made sure that whatever path the water took it encountered the same total resistance. This was in order to keep the flow even. I also kept the resistance at any point no less than the resistance of a 10mm ID pipe. This was a bit more complex than it sounds because when there are multiple paths you have to work out the total resistance in parallel 1/R = 1/R1+1/R2+1/R3... . But as I said It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it.
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