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Super Cooling Device

Pretty cool, I reckon ;)

This one is perhaps the most elegant and simplest of the lot. And also perhaps the least likely to work!
I can't remember why I thought of this gadget, but I've talked about it with a few people and thought they are initially sceptical, I usually convince them ...
The gadget in question, a super cooler, would be a little larger than a packet of cigarettes (Um, the big packets!), be able to cool down a liquid or gas to perhaps as low as -200°C or so, and have no moving parts. The usual response is bull....!", initially. ;)
The cooler is made up of several main parts -
- The loop
- The heater
- The 'aligner'
- The laser cooler

(diagram of cooler gadget to go here)

- The core of the cooler is a small rectangular loop, hollow, and full of ionised hydrogen gas. (Protons, for the scientifically aware) This allows the gas to be moved around by a solenoid, which is located on one of the long sides of the loop.
- On one of the short sides of the loop is a heater, which heats the gas to a pre-determined temperature, say, 50°C or so. (Or higher, as this would allow the cooler to start up from room temperature.)
- The 'aligner' is a solenoid type device that sits 90° to the loop, and it aligns the vibrations of the gas atoms to a single, uniform direction. This is one of the important actions - With any substance, as you heat it it's atoms vibrate faster and faster, so if you have a very pure gas that you know the properties of very accurately, then when you heat it to a specific temperature you'd know exactly how much vibration is going on.
- The laser cooler is the other important devices in the cooler, as it would need to work on a specific frequency because it would be run through a prism & mirrors that would spread the beam over the width of the loop. (across the diameter of the loop) What happens is this; if you can get a laser at just the right frequency to hit an atom that's vibrating at just the right frequency, the laser tends to make the atom stop vibrating .... so the atom loses all it's heat energy and becomes cold. VERY cold.
(Note that this effect has already been demonstrated in IBM's labs in the US, and again it was for super-cooling atoms to see how they behave at very low temperatures, ie, a tiny fraction above absolute zero, -273°C)
For actual cooling to take place, a heat exchanger type device would have to be put around the part of the long side of the loop that contains the solenoid. This is because the rest of the loop needs to be kept clear for the heater, laser cooler, etc. Whilst on the subject of the heater, the reason it would have to heat the gas up to a pre-determined temperature is because the heat exchanger would be dumping in varying amounts of heat to the cooler, and so to make the whole thing a lot simpler (simple closed-loop feedback to keep track of the temp variations instead of all sort of compensations going on, etc)
the best way, I think, is to heat the gas up beyond what it normally would get to and then cool it right down from there. I think that if higher start temperatures were needed, then several 'steps' in the frequencies for heating and cooling could be used, eg, 200°C down to 0°C, then a quick shift to lower frequencies to go down to -200°C or so.
So what could it be used for? I'd say that since it would use (probably) very little power it would be great for portable coolers, refrigerators for small boats, cars, etc. Perhaps when used in conjunction with a bigger heat exchanger it could be used for automotive air-conditioning, but one that uses very little power.
As with all the other gadgets described in these pages, it's just a thought and so although it'll never be made I hope it stimulates some other ideas from more clever people then good luck to them.
(And don't forget me when the pay cheques start coming in! ;) )

On to the -
- Geothermal Power Plant
- Laptop computer electronic circuit simulator
- Anti-aircraft missile system
- Horizontally opposed diesel aircraft engine
- Different electric car
- Listening spy device
- Super cooler device
- Land speed record car contender
- Water speed record contender