First, my obligatory salute to Kevin Gilmore, tech god.
Now, to disagree with you. I've pondered an unhealthy amount about subjects I will never be appreciated for by the general public or be able to use in any practical application. One of these is audiophilia. Another is computer cooling.
Quote:
| Those computer cooling systems are just barely able to do 65 watts. Not going to hold up to 800 watts of standby power. |
Usually watercooled systems take around 100 watts, much more if one uses peltier cooling. The problem is not the amount of heat that can be disposed of, it is the amount of heat that can be removed through the waterblock in a timely manner. 800 watts(don't know about multichannel) is easily doable considerring the prices that are being thrown around here. Your heatsink looks very adequate, unlike many tiny, tiny CPU waterblocks, which have to take the entire wattage out of a >1cm square area. What kind of temperatures would be safe to handle this thing with?
There MUST be a way to replace the haskris beast. I think you should be able to easily rig up a system that has enough cooling, you just have to expand what a normal overclocking enthusiest uses.
1)Take a few large heatercores($20-$30 at your local auto junkyard), rig them up in sequence or parallel(would need experimentation to find the right mix, most heatercores abhor high pressure)
2)Add quality pump( Lets see... you said 3 gallons per minute. 180 GPH. I'll double that. An eheim 1250 is 317GPH. )
3)Put in an aquarium for reservoir(although its not absolutely necessary in theory, in practice you need it because it a)gives you a lot more elbow room before your entire system's water temperature gets critical b)makes it possible to bleed the air out of your system, and c) lets you refill it after the inevitable leak)
4)Add some large fans(whatever fits your heatercores), get them down to a manageable voltage(manageable=relatively quiet) and you're done.
Have you tried measureing the temps of the water coming out of the heatsink? You would probably need copper tubing while the water is still extraordinarily hot, when it gets below the point at which it will damage plastic, you can use flexible tubing.
Daniel Ritter, an excellent tech writer,
experimented with a 200 watt load of resistors to test a large radiator(90mmx270mm) and ended up with water stable at 9 degrees above ambient. Seeing how heatercores vary enormously in size, and its not hard to get one much bigger, and how a heatercores have much better heat-dissipation ability than standard finned radiators of the same size, it shouldn't be hard to get a few to manage a many hundred watt load. The waterchiller doesn't have special mechanisms by which it magically releases heat, it relies on the same heat-exchange technology(except for whatever chills it below ambient) that good ole computer WC systems use.
Another thought: If one wanted a below-ambient system and was willing to sacrifice a fully closed system, at the advantage of wasting MUCH less water than 3 gallons per minute, they could try evaporative cooling, based off a bong. The idea is to evaporate water over a large surface area. In this case, direct convection(and phase change) can be used instead of conduction through metal into air(which is a quite good insulator). One nice idea I've seen discussed is spreading water(using either a holed pipe, or, if you don't want to drill one, a sprinkler tube or two) over a container filled with ping-pong balls(or a similar sized granular substance). Air is pushed from fans(they should be ducted from above using clothesdryer ducting to prevent getting wet) just above the waterline, through the container and out through the top. A little bit of the water goes with them, along with the heat required to change it to vapor. The resulting cooled water is pumped out of the pool at the bottom. While this wastes water, it is NOTHING compared to even a minute or two of running water once through your system and washing it down the drain. You might need(considerring the wattage) a gallon or two each listening session.
Quote:
posted by grinch
it seems like it'd be very easy to setup a reservoir for the setup and then you could simply leave it on all the time within the pump structure (similar to the way that people watercool personal computers) and not waste hundreds of gallons of water a month. |
The only reason I go to the elaborate means posted above is that either spending $4500 for a waterchiller, or wasting roughly 130 THOUSAND gallons a month(if run constantly) is unnacceptible for most people, even most people interested in projects like these. This cuts the cost down to about $3000, which is a lot more maneagable than $7000(And is passes the psychological barrier of "costs the same as a nice used car").
Even if it doesn't work, if I were to want this project I would waste a few hundred dollars on this to see if it works before blowing four grand on an industrial waterchiller.
Oh, BTW, another thing I've been meaning to ask you: what is the stepped attenuator used on
this amp? It looks homebuilt or something.
