Electric Radiator for WCing?

[David Coleman]

I put this topic here because it deals with pelts.

So, I have this problem.
I want to go WC, but I don't want to hack up my beautiful Coolermaster Wave Master, which does not have a nice place to put a good radiator. So, while I should have been no doubt studying for something, I thought up something that could work, and I figured I'd bounce the idea off of ya'll.

You take some copper pipe of, say, 3/8"ID, and bend it back and forth so you have a nice tight zig zag (with the pipes as close as possible--even touching). Then, where a radiator would normally have fins on these pipes and blow air across them, you put a peltier (or several) on the side (or both sides). Then a short passive heatsink . This way you don't have to have good air flow through the heat exchanger, because you've got pelts to cool it. Basically a thermoelectric radiator.

You'll want good case cooling I'd assume to get that heat out of there, but I've got a 120mm delta and a 120mm in my Fortron for exhaust, so that's covered (and an 80mm TT SF2 blowhole...forgot about that one ). With the TEC's it should be pretty effecient at removing heat, so it could be smaller than a radiator (say 80mm square or so). 8 pelts (4 per side, say 40mm square each, Qmax of ~60W each should do eh?)

So obviously there are some problems I see (not impossible to solve though):

1) How the heck are you going to power this? I'm thinking you couldn't just wire up an additional ATX PS to do this huh? Probably a custom (read: homebuilt) dedicated power supply taking up a couple of 5-1/4 bays or more.

2) How much is this going to cost? Copper tubing is cheap, and cheap TEC's at a place like this would be under 100USD

3) How much contact would the pelts be getting with the pipe? A potential concern, if it's a big deal you could do something like fill in the gaps with solder and/or solder a cold plate to the pipes for a nice smooth surface.


That's all I got for now. Any thoughts?

 

[nicspits]

i'll stop ya right here. it'd be extremely less costly to get a new wcing or direct peltier setup, probably more efficient too. not to mention saving time. an alternative would be a chiller unit (which is what you're basiclly talking about). However, if you do choose to do this by yourself, I would recommend peltier cooling a reservoir made out of copper. This would be much more effective as the surface area would be much better, you'd have to engross the pipes in thermal paste with just plan bent tubes (+20 just in paste). You could thermal epoxy heatsinks to the inside of the copper res to get more flow over the cool but you'll need offly large heatsinks on the back of the pelts to get good temps with the typical 60C difference.

Once again, I'd highly recommend just improving your current setup or making a real water chiller than doing what you propose with all factors concerned.

-Nic
P.S. you'd probably need a couple PSUs because you'd definately need more than 1 peltier.

 

[ZachM]

You don't have to "hack" up your case to install a radiator. You could easily fit a Black Ice Xtreme in the top between the optical drive bays and the power supply. You would only need to cut a blowhole for the fan. Get a holesaw or a jigsaw, plan everything out, mark twice, and cut once. Take your time cutting, and you shouldn't have a problem making a nice hole. That way you wouldn't have to deal with powering and cooling the pelts, that probably won't do the job effectively anyways.

 

[nicspits]

oh yeah, how about upgrading ur gcard instead?

 

[itchy5]

i say cut a blow hole thats what i did. worked well