Recent content by Larry Shick

Chet, thank you. It's amazing what a little study will uncover. It appears that the physics of this thing are approximately those of a "two-phase thermosyphon" which is a wickless heat pipe. The big surprise for me is that such beasts do not need to operate at or near the boiling point of...

Mr. A: Thanks for your quick response. Check me on this: By Gay-Lussac's Law, and assuming the space above the liquid stays "air," the pressure (bar) goes up linearly with temperature (K), so 1.0 bar at 22 C or 295 K, and about 1.26 bar at 100 C or 373 K. Vapor pressure of the liquid...

Suppose I have a sealed container of fixed volume containing 3/4 air and 1/4 of some liquid by volume at room temperature (22C). I wish to boil the liquid by applying external heat. As I apply heat to the container, the pressure inside the container will rise, which will change the boiling...

For what it's worth, this seems to be classified as an "open-loop direct surface-water cooling" (DSWC) system. There's a writeup at http://www.hvac.okstate.edu/Papers/Mitchell_and_Spitler_2013.pdf which indicates (p.126) that the upper limit for input water temperature for "sensible cooling" is...

Over a decade back there was a company that sold air cooling devices for cruising sailboats. A sailboat at anchor is chronically short of electrical energy unless one runs a generator, which has its own trade-offs. The essence of operation of these devices was to pump seawater up from some small...