Has anyone done any REAL experiments with CFC and Hybrid Chiller rates?

After a long debate on another thread over hybrid chillers and CFC's, I thought I would conduct an experiment with one CFC and one hybrid chiller and look at their effectiveness cooling 5.5 gallons of boiling water.

I'm curious if anything like this has been done before. I'm probably going to turn it into a paper for my thermo-dynamics and fluid dynamics classes.

The coilers for both chillers will be 25' and made of 3/8" soft copper tubing.

The CFC will be of standard design.
The hybrid will be a true "Coil-in-tube" Design with water being forced out by pressure.

Let me know your thoughts!

I realize that I'm really just proving the first law of thermo-dynamics by doing this experiment, but I thought it would have a little bit more merit in the homebrew community.

I say if you got the time and the equipment, go for it!

I think the only downside is that you'll be trying to sell the loser of the two to a group a people who just read the results ;-)

Bobby_M said:

I think the only downside is that you'll be trying to sell the loser of the two to a group a people who just read the results ;-)

Click to expand...

I don't really care about selling it. Most of the equipment will be free from work except the copper. I can easily take the copper from the "loser" and build the "winner"

The experiment will entail the following:

Data acquisition system monitoring T type thermo-couples at the "wort" input and output as well as the input of the water temperature.

The boiled water will be gravity fed instead of pump fed to reduce the amount of work for me, and to make the most effective method available to everyone despite their budget.

The CFC has already been build from the "DIY" thread with 3/8" copper and 5/8" rubber hose. The copper coil was built from ~26 feet of 3/8".

The hybrid chiller will be constructed of a 18 inch tall, 12 inch diameter PVC pipe with 25' of copper coiled inside. I'm going to make the inside coil side approx. 2 inches from the walls of the PVC. HOPEFULLY i can fit the coil inside the tube. If not, I will just use a larger pipe. The top and bottom of the hybrid will be sealed with endcaps. At the top and bottom of the pipe I will have the cooler water input and output.

I will probably make two runs with the hybrid chiller. One with the cooler water being fed from the top and drained from the bottom, and vice versa.

If any of you other engineers what to input anything else, let me know!

For the Hybrid Chiller
Put your feed water in the bottom and out the top.
Make your internal coil imperfect to generate uneven type flow.
this will improve the efficiency of the system.
You could even put a couple baffles in and do a 10 page study on baffle location and size

Have fun wish I had the time.

So are you going to start a betting pool?

My money's on the CFC

I gotta sound like the dummy...What's a hybrid chiller? JZs Whirlpool chiller? Other? I'm way behind, I guess. I need to stop doing experiments and start read more HBT, I guess

I think it is an interesting experiment and look forward to the results. I have an IC and am pretty happy with it. But, if I had the money when I was buying, I would have built an immersion-whirlpool chiller: http://www.mrmalty.com/chiller.php. I am not sure you can beat those results.

I'm really doing this experiment out of boredom, however I will probably turn it into a paper while I'm finishing my mechanical degree.

If you looked solely at the first law of thermodynamics, the CFC will win this. For proper heat exchange, you NEVER flow your coolant the same direction as the media you wish to cool.

What I really want is clear data between the two.

Since I'm using mostly equipment from work, I will give pricing on each part as well as pictures for each. To date, I haven't seen a picture of a true hybrid chiller. There are plenty of pictures of coils in ice baths.

Dont even waste your time flowing the water in the same direction as the wort. No wonder you gave me such a hard time about the hybrid chiller if you thought I was gonna to that.

Also I think in order for the test to be fair you should put something inside the coils as well. I would never build a hybrid chiller with 10" of open water flowing through it. I'd recommend an inch from the copper coil to the outside tube and another inch to an inside tube that is capped. That way you have an inch of water on each side of the coils flowing in the opposite direction of the coils. You should also angle the coolant so that it spins in the opposite direction instead of going straight through.

Without those design elements there really is no point in comparing the 2 designs.