Water Cooling

[Variac]

Reasons:
You want to move the heat from a bunch of Class A amps out of your room.

Its a project That is what justifies the computor type system-but expensive

You have a pool or fountain close by

You can eliminate hundreds of dollars of heatsinks. Almost all the parts required can be acquired free or cheap surplus. No need for fancy machining as I explained above.

The boxes in your listening room can be many times smaller than
a heatsink cooled amp- better SAF.

If you need fans they are in another room and quieter.

Except for the price of heatsinks, The best solution to this is just to have air cooled (even with a fan!) amps in an adjacent room, with the speaker cables through the wall! BUT that isn't always available, plus we want to LOOK at our amps !

SEARCH you guys!

Jonathan- maybe you could list some threads - then we don't have to hear the same points made yet again..

[SM2GXN]

I hate to destroy the fun, but it's a fact that you can not reduce the size of the heatsinks because you use water cooling or what ever else for that kind of matter. With water cooling you are only transporting the heat from one place to another, the heatsinks need to be just as big or even bigger.

Isn't that the meaning to transport away the heat somwere outside the amplifier. What you say will apply only in case without any type of heat exchanger. I don't know what you mean by using even bigger heatsinks?
Think no water cooling will work properly without any type of heat exchanger unless you got a big barrel of water..
and depending of heat to transport


Bjorn

[K-amps]

"Bigger Heatsinks"

I think he is referring to thermal and exchange losses... and being conservative....

[jacco vermeulen]

i just came up with the solution!

I will build regular fat heatsink class A amplifiers and stick each one in a kitchen refrigerator.

Regular heatsinks can be more efficient with a vent on it.
The higher the airspeed, the better the cooling.
Up to a limit : where air flow speed will start heating instead of removing heat.

Alloy and Copper are very good heat carriers.
I know, i worked at an alloy molding company long ago.
Air is not, air is one of the best isolators, so air is actually a bad medium to take away heat from heatsinks.
With unlimited water flow speed thermal resistance of a heatsink will be limited by the heat transconductance of the material used.

With Alloy or Copper heatsinks that means an average heatsink would be able to take away huge amounts of heat, provided the fluid cooling capability is up to it.

The tranny heat exchanger on my Chevy is small, only a square foot, but it can handle an enormous amount of heat from an automatic gearbox driven by 400 HP, pushing 6000 lbs.
Last februari 2004 i blew the automatic doing way to fast with a torn membrane in the transmission.
I rebuilt the transmission myself, watching the burnt friction plates made me respect the strength of US automatic gearboxes and heat exchangers.

I would never put watercooling in a computer, that i would consider risky.

I search Vari-master, i posted on the CPU watercooling thread before.
I like just two feet of speaker cable between an amp and a loudspeaker, no more.
That is why i prefer building mono amplifiers.
Vents just dont hack it unless they run full rpm, and i've got 27 of them Papst.

[jacco vermeulen]

I built a heat exchanger for a boat diesel engine.
Sort of looks like the Zalman Res. , i remember NP mentioning the Zalman some time ago.

With diesel engines the cooling fluid from the engine runs through copper piping inside the heat exchanger, on the outside of the pipes is seawater pumped through it by a additional waterpump going in and out of the hull through holes.

Straight tubing does lead to laminair flow more easilly, the best way to transfer heat is turbulent flow.
If the tubing through a watercooler is twisted or bent that would improove turbulent flow immensely.
My choice would be, for the ones able to do machining, a two piece solid rectangular alloy or copper block with machined fluid passages and plenty curving.
Again, like you see on car radiators.
Add a few holes, thread them, flatten the blocks and fasten them with some fluid car enginehead sealant.
(i am learning brian)

[jacco vermeulen]

Of course, the Variac/GRollins way goes too, just bend the pipes and weld them to a copper plate.

Downside is the risk of the copper plate not remaining flat by the welding job !

[BobEllis]

Originally posted by jacco vermeulen
...
Up to a limit : where air flow speed will start heating instead of removing heat...

The airflow will be much noisier than tolerable long before it starts heating. Somewhere above 800 Knots Indicated Airspeed at around 10,000 feet will provide enough heating to soften some aircraft paints. Chibo said we were going to peel some paint that day, and we did.

[BrianDonegan]

I was thinking about something like this...

A copper block with a water chamber, in and out ports.

Devices such as TO-3' mount to copper heatsink sort of like this one: http://rocky.digikey.com/WebLib/IERC...-423,7-438.pdf (top of page), but with a perimeter lip with an o-ring gasket. The o-ring sits on a recessed flange in the copper (I think this is a confusing description) such that the fins extend into the water chamber. The pins of the device then protrude from the block and can be soldered to wires or have a PC-board mounted. I'll try to draw up a little sketch.

The drawback from this idea is that it does not isolate the electronics from the water securely enough for me. maybe a double o-ring. The advantage is that the device can be mounted to the heatsink without an electrical isolator, as the o=ring isolates the little sink from the block.

I'll draw something

[SM2GXN]

To create the cooling block to mount transistors to, he first got a 1/8" thick copper plate long enough to mount them in a row . It was somewhat taller than the mounting area needed for the transistors. He then soldered a piece of copper pipe along the face close to one edge for coolant.

That's what I did with an power supply for long time ago, it did work but as said earlier somewhat overkill. As a true DIYer I had to test. I don't no the reason why put lot of money on fancy heatsinks just to make it look cool, sound would probably be the same for both methods besides you will have room for another amp. I would go for a water pipe like the example above, easy done, low cost and efficient. My water cooled amp is a tube amp so it doesn't match here

Bjorn

[GRollins]

I see that people are trying to reinvent the wheel yet again. This topic comes up at least once or twice a year, but as far as I know, I did the first thread here on it; as Variac noted, I've been water cooled for years.
Someone said something about bending pipe. I can't see why you'd want to, but if you think it looks cool or something, go for it. Every time water cooling comes up, people decide that they have to complicate the thing far, far out of proportion to what's really needed. All this talk about oil and bizarre chemicals is really unnecessary. Water does just fine.
All I did was use standard, straight, cheap copper plumbing pipe--1/2" diameter. I soldered 90 degree elbows on it until I had a configuration that worked, then used brass nipples to attach vinyl line to carry the water. My system runs somewhere around 100 degrees F, plus or minus a few degrees, and dissipates something on the order of 6-700W of heat. It was cheap...far cheaper than buying standard heatsinks.
And the copper looks sexy as hell, too.
You guys go ahead and make it complicated if you want--I'm content to have something that looks cool and works.

Grey