HELP: Immersion Cooler Info

Hello all,

I am just getting into home brewing and happy to find such a large community devoted to such.

I have a request for anyone who has brewed with an immersion cooler.

I am a student at the University of Florida, and for my Heat and Mass Transfer class we have to do a project. My professor agreed to my idea of working out the specifics of heat transfer involved in wort chilling.

Of importance to heat transfer calculations is the thermal conductivity of the fluid involved. In my case, the wort.

Anyone here who has brewed or is going to soon brew using a wort chiller, I would greatly appreciate some measurements concerning the chilling process.

In my project, I am basing my calculations on an immersion style chiller like this:


Hopefully, the one most commonly used will be of 3/8" copper tubing 25' in length.

Here is what I need:

Temperature of the wort before and after chilling.
Temperature of the cooling liquid (water) at inlet and outlet.
Total volume of water used in the process
Time taken
Volume of wort chilled

From what I have read, I hope to see a pretty standard setup of 5 gallons of wort cooked in a stainless steel pot similar in style to these:


Using these data, I should have enough information to get a rough estimate of the thermal conductivity of wort (which admittedly varies greatly in content among different types of beer).

Now, I understand that the immersion chiller design isn't the most effective, I'm just trying to get a more accurate estimate of the thermal properties of the wort itself.

If you have a different type of chiller and are able to provide the aforementioned information and chiller specifications, that could also be useful.

This is quite a favor to ask, but hopefully someone out there will be interested.

Thanks

I had 40' of copper 1/2" dia. At the end of the boil it was 215 F and cooled down to 74 F volume of wort (wiezenbock) was 42 gal give or take 1/2 gal. water to chill was 57 F and this is just a guess but I think I used about 15 gals of water to cool. For the first few mins the out let water was 186 F I was just throttling the flow with a ball valve to make sure to catch the most heat in the beginning. And it took about 22 mins to cool to this temp. Don't hold me to this if it don't calc right I did have a few HBs hopefully this helps you. If it does let me know!!! Have fun

Thank you very much for helping me out. A few further questions:

Did you stir the wort as it was cooling?
Was the brew kettle cooling in air, or submerged in water?

67coupe390 said:

I had 40' of copper 1/2" dia. At the end of the boil it was 215 F and cooled down to 74 F volume of wort (wiezenbock) was 42 gal give or take 1/2 gal. water to chill was 57 F and this is just a guess but I think I used about 15 gals of water to cool. For the first few mins the out let water was 186 F I was just throttling the flow with a ball valve to make sure to catch the most heat in the beginning. And it took about 22 mins to cool to this temp. Don't hold me to this if it don't calc right I did have a few HBs hopefully this helps you. If it does let me know!!! Have fun

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