use the dehumidifier screening out of an old furnace.return air duct..or an old dehumidifier that some dude chucked..put it in vinegar for a day then clean off the scale and voila brand new humidifying water dropplet catching system..hah haaa,damn,, all that cash i spent on water cooling

nateman_doo

I REALLY like the screen idea too!!  It will ensure decent distribution of droplets.  Your shower head would have to shower right on to the screen.  It would be interesting to try since I have a bunch of window screen just sitting around the house.

Cool rig you got there man

ROFL, I just caught the original thread title. They made you change that? Whatever for?

Evaporative cooling towers are based on the laws of latent heat of evaporation, not on sensible heat like a radiator.
 
each pound of water evaporated absorbs 970.6 Btu's or approx 284.6 watts of thermal energy.
 
Therefore a closed loop system would have to be HUGE as it would need a VERY large condensation chamber to disperse the evaporated vapor, and re-condense the water vapor to liquid.
 
example again...
that 1 pound of evaporated water would occupy approx 1600 times its original volume...
so you would need a condensation chamber several times larger then 1600 times the volume of 1 pound of water
 
Here is a link to some simple but relevant design info.
  http://coolingtower-desig...orative-cooling-tower/
A better way to improve its efficiency is to add media, which will improve the surface area and improve the thermal exchange by increasing the potential for latent heat of evaporation.
 
 
Hey Nate , The Hvac-r is starting to pay off !!!! 
 

nateman_doo

Lets just say a MOD PM'd me.   ;)

Gotta say I love the whole concept, just read all but pages 8-9, any recent updates?
Would it work with no rads? Have you been watching Jay and Silent Bob?
Seriously though, as crazy as the whole thing looks, it's way cool.(pun intended)
If there were 9 mister nozzles in a descending spiral from top to a 1/3 of the way down, the water would atomize better...just a thought.

I tried mister heads but my pumps couldn't move the water through them and I had a pond pump and an eheim in my system so I had some pumping power. Eventually, the power bills take their toll especially if you are folding 24/7 like I was at the time. I did some experimenting but the basic bong setup is about as effective as you can get. I tried screens etc. different methods of breaking up the water and slowing it down but nothing really worked any better than just shooting the water out of a shower head and letting a fan blow up though it.

Yeah Nate, I was hoping that misting the water would allow me to lose some tower height without losing any cooling performance, but when I started up the system....nothing happened lol. You're right, apparently it would take a fire hose to get the water up the bong and and thorough a mister array. Just not worth the trouble, or expense in my case, ultimately. Still it can be a fun project. I certainly had a good time with it, and had fun experimenting, but reality kept rudely butting in.

Also, the cooling fans inevitably pull in dust and contaminants which eventually clog up your blocks, especially if your blocks have micro-pins/grooves.

Fuel filter always helps to keep that stuff to a minimum.

Yea, Rob is good like that.  Both WAY over my head at least.
 
I just always looked at it like me blowing on my soup in a spoon.  It eventually gets cooler when you blow on it.  Take that same amount of soup and disperse it into a pattern that allows for more surface area (instead of just the top surface  of a spoonful) and you have more wind cooling the soup.  Much better way to eat soup if u ask me.

Rudster816

I think this is a great basic design.  Things I would change/add to the description or design: The top 4 restriction points would be those fine droplet shower heads or garden hose ends (I think that was the original intent).  I'd also increase the distance from  the shower heads to the collection "pan" to allow for more evap.  I'd change the 120mm fan into an axial blower for higher airflow.  The little clip thing at the end is genius: that'll stop still dropletized water from being directly blown out of the system and will drip the liquid stuff that hasn't dissipated any/much heat back into the reservoir.  One more change I'd make is open it up above the 80mm fan.  No condensation and return.  If you insist on recapturing the water so you can have a closed system and not have to refill frequently or clear out dust, don't go with PVC pipe at the top of that.  Go with sheets of aluminum foil or copper tubing (something that will dissipate a bunch of the condensation energy, allowing the water to cool).  If you have some aluminum sheets you could create your own "heatsink" (glued on with the aid of TIM?) where you increase the surface area exposed to the room and have an additional fan up top to cool that.
 
One problem with this system, is you're blowing air in on the left, but there's not a defined outlet for escape.  Meaning you're creating positive pressure.  I'm sure you might leak out though fittings and cracks in the system, but in that case you're still going to lose water (in the form of vapor).  Although that's great from a heat capacitance standpoint, you might not have the closed system you think you have.  One solution is to simply imbed the blower/fan inside the physical structure, giving it enough space to draw the air from.  You might have to deal with corrosion of the electronics though then. {edit: it looks like the illustrator wanted that fan to be internal, just mounted external and sealed off.  However, then I don't think you'll do a great job of pushing the air, just creating a little bit of turbulence}. I think just leaving it open above the 80mm fan and replacing the water as needed is the best sol'n.  You could even have a toilet float system where if the water dips below a certain level, an inlet from your tap or an additional transparent reservoir comes into the main tank.  Or the float could be hooked to a piezoelectric system (like the one present in a dehumidifier, but in reverse so it shuts off if the water level goes BELOW the float point) that just shuts down the water pump (and shower heads :( ) if there's not enough water to pump.  But then you need to have a way to shut down your computer automatically without crashing it too.  So, the plumbing float system would be a lot easier to rig up in comparison to the dehumidifier float.
 
Edit: looks like the plumbing/toilet float was covered in illustrated form on the previous page (I haven't read all the text, so it may have been covered before that even).  Doh!  I guess I'm contributing no new insight:P

The temps you see are impressive for water alone, how often do you have to add water to counter the evaporation?
 
Here is my suggestion...
Where the hot water flows out can you apply some kind of water  pump assembly (because it is water sealed) to atomize the water droplets as it passes thru the pump blades? Note: You would have to keep the motors external to avoid heat transfer. If this should show promise you could develop a series of atomization blades (of your design) within the unit which are turned via a small motor and belt drive mechanism.
 
Alternative idea, looking at the diagram in post #18 far above...
Add sour mash to the hot water along with a puke trap, I wonder if this would serve as a dual purpose unit PC COOLER/ Alcohol DISTILLERY?
 

I noticed you had a window in the background. If you had a window a/c unit, you should be able to catch and re-use the condensation from it. It would 1) Cool the room. 2) de-humidify the room and make the evaporative system more and pump the heat outside more effectively. 3) allow you to recycle the water back into the system.
 
Side note: Some of the newer a/c units recycle the water automatically to keep the water loss down, and keep the indoor humidity from going too low. Just a heads-up.
 
ps: bad-ass setup :D
 
                                     -Yavol

Btw, before I have to go to work I want to post one more thing. If you can somehow manage to put maybe a 2L or 3L coke bottle down the main tube. What you can do is cut the top and bottom part off so you have a cylinder, and then attach some of that plastic door screen material (the kind that keeps the bugs out, but lets the air pass) with something like epoxy. Do this with a few bottles, then put them down the tube. If you have a problem with them going all the way down, just drill some holes at the bottom where you want them to stop, pass something like a straw trough them, and seal it off with glue. The stacked screens will help disperse the water, slow it down and provide more surface area.
 
Ps: make sure to put something on the bottom of the bottles so that when they go down, they don't stack like Styrofoam cups. Perhaps something like two straws in a x pattern glues together.
 
 
                                  -Yavol

I see what he is saying. So you have a stream of water flowing down the tube because of pressure problems with misters or whatever. He saying take a 2-3L coke bottle. Cut the top and bottom of it off so it's just a thin wall cylinder. Then take some of the plastic window screening and put it inside the cylinder. When the water runs down the pipe, it will run into the cylinder and spread out over the screen increasing it's surface area without having to do a pump change. You can put multiple of these cylinders inside the pipe and use whichever you choose to secure them or just stop them from going too far down in the pipe. The bonus to this as it can also stop anything like insects from getting into the bottom collection of liquid. Thats actually a very very good idea. 2-3 of these cylinders inside the pipe would act as mini chambers where the surface area of the water is increased dramatically and would increase the cooling of the setup.