This is a CPU Cooler? - Vortex Chiller

Compressed air is one of the MOST expensive forms of energy in an industrial plant coming in at almost 8 times that of electricity. Watt for watt cooling between a peltier cooler and vortex cooler, the vortex cooler would cost far more money to operate. That said, vortex coolers are still awesome.

you should attach it to a cpu water block, and leave the other fitting open. I think it will have a much better effect, as it will cool the copper block while allowing proper direction for the air to move.

I’ve used these at my job. I work at a nuclear facility and some times we have to wear protective clothing that is attached to an air compressor so we can receive fresh air. We use the vortex tubes as a form of heat stress mitigation. We can also flip the vortex tube around when we are dealing with cold weather. Quite a handy piece of technology.

"The frost is only on the outside... But how did they do that?" They didn't - you did. And also conveniently answered a question I had, while you were at it. You mentioned you used "filtered, oil-free air," but largely the problem with a compressor is less likely oil in the air and more likely water. Compressed air alone has tons of moisture, so much so that if you put your hand in front of a stream of air right off a compressor (at a safe distance, of course) it'd get damp basically instantly. Your filter is, like many, also a drier. No moisture in the outgoing air equals no water to create frost. Only the outside, in contact with air at typical ambient humidity, forms frost.

2:12 Hot air is not dense, cold air is denser. A vortex tube creates cold air and hot air by forcing compressed air through a generation chamber, which spins the air at a high rate of speed (1,000,000 rpm) into a vortex. The high speed air heats up as it spins along the inner walls of the tube toward the control valve. A percentage of the hot, high speed air is permitted to exit at the valve. The remainder of the (now slower) air stream is forced to counterflow up through the center of the high speed air stream in a second vortex. The slower moving air gives up energy in the form of heat and becomes cooled as it spins up the tube. The inside counterflow vortex exits the opposite end as extremely cold air. Vortex tubes generate temperatures as much as 100 deg F (56 deg C) below the inlet air temperature. The fraction of hot air exhausted can be varied to change the outlet cold air temperature, with more exhaust resulting in a colder cold air stream (with lower flow rate), and less exhaust resulting in a warmer cold air stream (and higher flow rate).

A shroud needs to be made to direct the cold air more evenly over the fins of the heatsink. I know Alex wants to do this, don't let this be the last time we see this magic air cooler hunk of metal. And I know Linus wants to milk this as much as possible for how much that costs!

These have been around since at least the 70’s. I’m a master auto tech. We used them to heat and cool carburetor choke springs to adjust properly. That price is insane. The last one I purchased was about 12-15 years ago for $25. Still use often to cool and heat temp sensors for diagnostics… And classic car chokes now and then

I've had to buy a couple of these back in the 80's. Used to buy 'em off the Snap-On truck. You use it to test a carburetor's Automatic-Choke on older vehicles. It allows you to quickly heat and cool the actuator-coil that opens and closes the carb's intake butterfly. They were only about $30 back then. Linus needs an inline Air-Drier Filter Combo, coming off that compressor.

8:30 "why is there frost only on the outside?" simple your compress air has an air dryer. so the air in the tube has very little humidity to create frost where as the outside is exposed to regular humidity air which has plenty of water to create frost. I'm sure the movement of air through the tube plays a role as well but I think that's the biggest factor to not creating frost on the inside.

Random fact: JPL uses these to cool the Earth based twins of the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on hot summer days. Since Earth is a lot hotter than Mars they have to be actively cooled here and vortex cooling is one of the few methods that's compact enough to fit inside the already jam packed rover. We just have to run a compressed air line along with all the tethers and other connections to the rover and voila, cooling!

We use them in industrial equipment to keep the PLC enclosure cool in place of a phase exchange cooler.

I was a painter in a factory, and we had hoods that feed us fresh air, we used the vortex tubes as air conditioning to our head. You could turn it up a bit and condensation would form on the inside of the plastic window. I then used a second one and placed it in a painters jacket with a rubber hose with holes to keep my upper body cool. I didn't want to come out because our plant was like 100+ through the summer.

10:50 You are losing all the cooling power through the tube. In order for the vortex principles to work the cold site has to be a much smaller diameter than the warm site. As soon as you add a silencer or a tube the efficiency gets a lot worse.

I feel like this should work with the right contact area on the CPU, maybe with some special heat pipe rigging

The way I understand it: Heat is basically the rate/speed a particle/molecule move/shaking. so the outer spiraling vortex is getting hotter because of frictions with the metal that makes the air particle "shaking more". it moves really fast that made it only want stay outside because of the centrifugal. now the neat part is only the outer vortex can go outside of the hot end tube. but now we still have mass flow that cannot escape through the hot end and it will look through the other end. the inside vortex is slower because the high speed air forces to be on the outside diameter. the slower air creates a vortex in the opposite rotation because of the returning impulse effect of the hot end nozzle. the slower vortex/air molecules "crashes" with the outer vortex that made the inner vortex slower and slower. the slower particle that has crashed stays in the most inside part of the vortex while the faster particles move to the ouside because of the centrifugal again. this "speed loss" over time creates colder and colder air

You should make a mostly sealed case. Stick the cold end inside the case, hot end out side, and run regular CPU/GPU cooler and see if it helps.

I've used a vortex cooler as a replacement when there was a leaking water circuit in a mold. You were just missing a water block or similar. Instead of directly blowing air at the cpu there needed to be a thermal mass to remove the heat from. If it works for 400F/204C plastic against a beryllium copper core pin, it'll work on a cpu.

I used to work in heavy industrial environments and we relied heavily on using vortex coolers to keep our equipment cool enough to operate reliably. Really the only reason we chose those over refrigeration or peltier coolers was the abundance of compressed air available and the reliability of the device. We generated all of our own compressed air for steelmaking so as far as cost goes, it was "essentially" free compared to the overall operating cost of the facility.

We have big industrial air compressors in our plant. Let me tell you, you get water in those lines (Say from condensation on a hot day) you're going to have a very bad (and dangerous) day. That whole week was an absolute mechanical nightmare.

As a Mechanic of the 70s and beyond, we had a device very similar called a Choke Checker. With carburetors you need a choke mechanism to make the fuel ratio rich on cold starts and this device could safely spray cold or hot air on the bi-metal coil that moved the choke valve.