Ron Earp
Admin
Repost from one of the race forums but I figured some here might have some interest.
I've had this idea for many years to have an iceless cooling system for a race car. I started back around five years ago and tried to build a system around TECs but just couldn't get the system to cool enough to make it viable for use.
Early this summer I revisited the project because TECs had changed over the years and dropped in price. So had much of the support equipment such as small radiators and so on that an iceless system would need. A buddy of mine Deon is an engineer and has a small CNC mill at home that he fabricated. I enlisted his help with the design of the unit based on the initial ideas and DR (Deon Ron, yeah, that works) COOL was born.
After a couple of different designs we finally came up with a system that seems to work well. It can chill the coolant down to freezing in about 15 mins in an unloaded system and with a cool shirt hooked up and a human inside it can maintain 9-13C, plenty enough to be cold when you are in the shirt. It has a small coolant reservoir inside and in theory you'd only have to add water to replace what gets lost hooking and unhooking the dry break connectors, which should last several weekends without water addtion.
The box below is the final design with a couple of extra like a three position temperature monitor (inflow coolant, heat engine hot/cold side), dry break connectors, and the possibility to switch it to a heating mode (not sure what the hell that would be used for!). All in all it has tested on the bench well and seems to do the job. I'm going to install it in the race car and try it out for next season.
The unit is fairly large, 20x10x7 and weighs about 14lbs. Not sure we could make it a lot lighter as it has a radiator, two liquid systems, two pumps, heat engine, four fans, plus breakers, switches, and of course the lighted pirate skull that was necessary to make it all work. Deon did a nice job with the CNC side of things, especially the skull.
I've had this idea for many years to have an iceless cooling system for a race car. I started back around five years ago and tried to build a system around TECs but just couldn't get the system to cool enough to make it viable for use.
Early this summer I revisited the project because TECs had changed over the years and dropped in price. So had much of the support equipment such as small radiators and so on that an iceless system would need. A buddy of mine Deon is an engineer and has a small CNC mill at home that he fabricated. I enlisted his help with the design of the unit based on the initial ideas and DR (Deon Ron, yeah, that works) COOL was born.
After a couple of different designs we finally came up with a system that seems to work well. It can chill the coolant down to freezing in about 15 mins in an unloaded system and with a cool shirt hooked up and a human inside it can maintain 9-13C, plenty enough to be cold when you are in the shirt. It has a small coolant reservoir inside and in theory you'd only have to add water to replace what gets lost hooking and unhooking the dry break connectors, which should last several weekends without water addtion.
The box below is the final design with a couple of extra like a three position temperature monitor (inflow coolant, heat engine hot/cold side), dry break connectors, and the possibility to switch it to a heating mode (not sure what the hell that would be used for!). All in all it has tested on the bench well and seems to do the job. I'm going to install it in the race car and try it out for next season.
The unit is fairly large, 20x10x7 and weighs about 14lbs. Not sure we could make it a lot lighter as it has a radiator, two liquid systems, two pumps, heat engine, four fans, plus breakers, switches, and of course the lighted pirate skull that was necessary to make it all work. Deon did a nice job with the CNC side of things, especially the skull.
