Would submerged rads work?

[maxib7]

I was wondering for the next build I make if I could suspend my radiators in water. Water is a much better conductor of heat right. So it would make sense that this solution would make my temps lower but would it work. I was wondering if it would cause any problems or the difference in temps would even be noticeable enough to justify the extra inconvenience of it. Lastly, if it is a good idea what method would you suggest? I could have like a water fall and the rads in the middle of it so water pours all over it (would look pretty cool to if I manage to pull it of nicely) or just have submerged in running water or just still water but idk if that would cause heat transfer problems

[Freaky_spider]

how far would this water source be?

 

it works BTW, there are people who have done it, to tired to search for a link tho

[Askew]

You could just pump waterfall water through the blocks if it's cool enough.

[Flight1sim]

Wait the water will be flowing right? If its flowing, then it should be fine... i think

If its still water wouldnt it make the entire system hotter?

[Freaky_spider]

Wait the water will be flowing right? If its flowing, then it should be fine... i think

If its still water wouldnt it make the entire system hotter?

water has a high specific heat capacity and thus it would take a lot of heat to heat the total system (the still water)

 

it takes 4186 Joule or Watts to heat 1 litre of water 1°C, 

[maxib7]

Wait the water will be flowing right? If its flowing, then it should be fine... i think

If its still water wouldnt it make the entire system hotter?

 

Yeah it would probably be flowing but do you think I could make like a water fall design so that water would be flowing over the whole rad constantly

[Enderman]

Yes it will work as long as it is constant fresh water, not the same water recirculating itself. This would work if you have a lake beside your house, or if your water is really cheap and you can afford to constantly waste thousands of litres of water just for cooling.

[matheez]

if you do it, take some photos, would be nice to see

[rmac52]

unless you then run that water somewhere else and replace it with new water its going to eventually reach equilibrium and essentially stop working.  The water will absorb the heat from the radiator but eventually that water will be the same temperature as the water inside the radiator an no heat will be removed from the system.

[Vendetta]

Should totally do like a clear plexi 240mm reservoir and mount it in the front then put your RAD in there and have it so your loop is running water in from the top so it will be like a waterfall Res that is cooling your radiator.

 

Edit* Obviously wouldn't work, just throwing silly ideas out there.

[Flight1sim]

Yeah it would probably be flowing but do you think I could make like a water fall design so that water would be flowing over the whole rad constantly

This might work

http://imgur.com/G7I03gy

[maxib7]

water has a high specific heat capacity and thus it would take a lot of heat to heat the total system (the still water)

 

it takes 4186 Joule or Watts to heat 1 litre of water 1°C, 

 

So if I put enough water in like a fish tank or something it wouldn't have to be running for good or atleast heat transer

[Freaky_spider]

So if I put enough water in like a fish tank or something it wouldn't have to be running for good or atleast heat transer

eventually it will reach the same temp as the water in the loop, 

 

realistically your rig uses 450 watts max

 

if you have a tank of 5 litres @ 20°C 

 

and the max temp of the water in the loop is 50°C (which is pretty realistically)

 

it would theoretically take 

 

5 litres * 4186 * (50°C - 20°C) = 627900 joules

 

and your system uses 450 watts

 

627900 / 450 = 1395 sec for all the water to heat up to 50°C

 

WARNING :THIS IS ALL THEORETICALLY 

 

(wanted to test if i still knew my fysics )

 

EDIT: its seconds instead of minutes 

[maxib7]

Yes it will work as long as it is constant fresh water, not the same water recirculating itself. This would work if you have a lake beside your house, or if your water is really cheap and you can afford to constantly waste thousands of litres of water just for cooling.

 

I would probably have a reservoir and a pump to recycle the water back to the top.

 

(I'm hating my isp so much right now! I've been trying to post this for like 5 min and my internet is going down like every 2 seconds! This happens like twice a day for like 10 mins!)

[maxib7]

eventually it will reach the same temp as the water in the loop, 

 

realistically your rig uses 450 watts max

 

if you have a tank of 5 litres @ 20°C 

 

and the max temp of the water in the loop is 50°C (which is pretty realistically)

 

it would theoretically take 

 

5 litres * 4186 * (50°C - 20°C) = 627900 joules

 

and your system uses 450 watts

 

627900 / 450 = 1395 sec for all the water to heat up to 50°C

 

WARNING :THIS IS ALL THEORETICALLY 

 

(wanted to test if i still knew my fysics )

 

EDIT: its seconds instead of minutes 

 

Wow that's pretty cool! i wouldn't have thought to have done the math, but would the ambient room temp cool the water at a rate faster than the rad b/c the ambient air has more surface area on the water than the rad. Even though the rad would have a higher temp difference

[Judist]

I suppose you could do it for fun.

Unless you plan on chilling the water (and fighting condensation) the best you can hope for is ambient. And tbh a quality rad in push/pull does well enough at restoring ambient imo.

[Peopie]

Wow that's pretty cool! i wouldn't have thought to have done the math, but would the ambient room temp cool the water at a rate faster than the rad b/c the ambient air has more surface area on the water than the rad. Even though the rad would have a higher temp difference

Well then essentially you are making a radiator for your radiator, which is kind of redundant

Radiators are designed to maximize their surface area so that the ambient air can cool them.

 

I guess by doing this you can get a bigger radiator than what you had purchased, but you probably wont have the same efficiency of physical volume of "radiator" to heat dissipation efficiency, unless you literally build another radiator.

 

If you wanted to try using a waterfall to cool the water to cool the radiator, that could work too, but having that would be pretty loud. Though if you had some sort of outdoor pond or fountain you could incorporate it with, that would be pretty cool. The only things you would have to worry about would be algae or other matter getting stuck in the fins of the radiator. 

 

Just remember that the heat has to go somewhere, and watercooling and air cooling usually throw the heat into the air which you can throw out of your house and into the outside fairly easily and at very low costs

[Grrizz]

Peopie pretty much summed it up, at the end of the day the heat has to go somewhere moving it from the radiator to another water source is fine but then what? and if you could use that secondary water source directly in the first place it would be more efficient anyway.

The only reasons I can think of that would make this (possibly) worth while is if you had a fresh flowing source of water (e.g. running a tap continuously, a stream on your property, etc.), a very large water source that wouldn't heat up (a pond or lake, etc) or if you wanted to do a "bong" cooler (been a while since I've seen one of those ) in each case using the radiator to isolate the internal closed loop from the open secondary cooler to avoid contaminants.

I would also look into plate heat exchangers if you were thinking about doing this with the secondary fluid having pressure behind it (pumped or otherwise) as they tend to be more space efficient because they are designed for fluid to fluid (or pressurised gas) exchange rather then fluid to gas (air).

[Shaqo_Wyn]

Peopie and Grrizz are right. Is your idea possible? Yes. Is it practical? No. You're essentially building a glorified water heater if you don't have a large enough body of water that can lose the heat to the environment fast enough to not eventually become saturated with heat, which in turn would adversely effect your cooling performance. Same would happen with flowing water if it's the same water re-circulating. Not to mention PC rads probably can't cope with being submerged in water for prolonged periods of time. 

 

There are plenty of ways you can make a feature out of conventional PC water-cooling. A big rad box with LED's for example and/or some big reservoirs that you don't fill to the top of the aqua pipe to still have that waterfall effect. 

 

In terms of performance. Just get 2 thick Quad 120 rads like Alphacool UT60's or EK XTX's and enjoy the great deltaT.

[B NEGATIVE]

You could always make an old skool geoloop...........

[jayeddings]

On 8/13/2014 at 5:36 PM, Judist said:

I suppose you could do it for fun.

Unless you plan on chilling the water (and fighting condensation) the best you can hope for is ambient. And tbh a quality rad in push/pull does well enough at restoring ambient imo.

Thank you, I was waiting for someone to mention water chilling the rads, but can't u just set the water chiller to ambient. If condensation  only happens below ambient you can just set the chiller to ambient and you wouldn't have to deal with condensation or constantly wasting water by cycling it with a flowing water system. The chiller would just be accounting for the heat of the pc, so it wouldn't even have to run all the time or be on full throttle, which would mean less noise.

[Radioactive Snowman]

19 minutes ago, jayeddings said:

Thank you, I was waiting for someone to mention water chilling the rads, but can't u just set the water chiller to ambient. If condensation  only happens below ambient you can just set the chiller to ambient and you wouldn't have to deal with condensation or constantly wasting water by cycling it with a flowing water system. The chiller would just be accounting for the heat of the pc, so it wouldn't even have to run all the time or be on full throttle, which would mean less noise.

This thread is almost 5 years old.. how did you even find this 

[cluelessgenius]

well in the end its all about heat transfer right? so from where to where do we ultimatly want to transfer? well its starts with the chip right? and where do we want that heat ?

if lets say we want it in the air then the fastest way would be to just have the chip make contact with...the air.

now a chip is pretty small and when it comes to transferring heat more surface area will help temperature to equalize between both materials faster.

so then with air coolers we just slap on a big ass metall heatsink. now the chip makes contact with the metall of the heatsink which might be a slower transfer rate but the heatsink offers so much more surface area that it more than copensates for that.

with water cooling its the same principal the water isnt cooling jack shit. its only a medium to transfer heat from the chip to the surface area of the radiators where air takes the heat off.

if you now submerge the rads all that surface area only helps with transfering heat from the rad to your bucket of water where then the surface area of th water in the bucket will determine the transfer rate witht the air.

 

with me so far?....i know im overexplaining...anyway...

 

so unless you submerge them in a verge shallow pool i think you might even decrease the surface area that contacts the air by going from rads to water bucket. 

 

on the other hand you disregard all my mumbling if hang the rads into a fresh water sping or a small lake or some other source of infinte cooling

[AngryBeaver]

Something else I have seen that is actually pretty clever is someone burying there rads X amount of feet in the ground and using geothermal cooling.

[AnonymousGuy]

This thread is super old but I'll just drop the "correct" answer here.

 

Don't submerge your radiators in water.  Period.  Buy a water to water stacked plate heat exchanger and this is the proper way of doing (duh) water to water heat exchange between your desktop loop and a body of water.  Another word for "radiator" is air to water heat exchanger.

 

That body of water can be whatever you want.  It can be geothermal, it can be chilled, it can come from a cooler filled with ice.  But do it the right way.  Dunking a radiator in water is a) inefficient because the fins are meant for air to go through them, not a thicker fluid like water b) the radiators WILL corrode because the case is made of steel even if the tubes and fins are brass.  I literally did this for a long time before I discovered heat exchangers existed, and this is what I've been running now for the last 6 years.