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Refrigerators To Cool With Sound (Cool!)
T-Kir writes "A very interesting report from the BBC where researchers at Penn State University are developing a prototype fridge that cools using metal plates and sound waves. If successful, this technology would help remove the dependance on gases that contribute to global warming. Talk about Cool!"
I remember reading an article about this tech over TEN YEARS ago... maybe 15. Nothing has come of it since then...
This space available.
Reduce the gases that contribute to global warming, but contribute to noises that drive Fido mad...
</senseless humour>
Check out their article here. Unfortunately, no mention of peoples' hair igniting.
Now maybe people will believe me when I tell them my fridge tells me to eat too much...
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
You are getting colder... very cold... colder...
It didn't work though. :(
If my fridge were to emit some cool Barry White, that's be pretty ... well... cool.
... now the "cool note"
First there was the "Brown note"
Thankfully, even if the fridge cracks open the vast sounds generated within will not escape because the intense noise can only be generated in the pressurised gas locked inside the cooling system. Thats a damn scary sounding (no pun) fridge!
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Yes, chlorofluorocarbons cause the greenhouse effect.
If this is so cool...how come my constantly loud neighbors haven't turned into icicles yet?
A gas that contributes to ozone layer erosion, not the "greenhouse effect" underlying global climate change.
kinda screws everyone who wants a nice quiet PC..........
Now maybe I can overclock my Athalon XP without the fire hazard...
Is it just me, or is that the least appetizing lump of ice cream ever? I wouldn't eat that, no matter what had cooled it down...
Sailing over the event horizon
Maybe this is what caused the Ice Age. I mean, we finally get this damn planet relatively warm and now people want to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors.
But will it be cheaper to build and cost less to operate. If not, doubt it will catch on.
You know, that sounds way more fun that cooling some ice cream. Or maybe I've been playing too many videogames.
All around, it sounds like a brilliant idea.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
If this is possible, wouldn't it be equally possible to cook something as well using sound?
sig
Err wait a minute, they're cooling with sound...ummm nevermind. Move along.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Sound can cool, because of the compression/expansion mentioned in the article. But heat does not just vanish, it is transferred to the sound by this process.
If the sound is left to bounce around inside the fridge, then it will heat up. The total energy in the fridge is increasing - cooling somewhere causes heating somewhere else.
If the sound is allowed out of the fridge, then this will cool the fridge. But who wants a 173dB fridge?
You can also make refrigerators using a Stirling-engine like gas compression cycle. The guys at Medis Technologies have designed this. See here for the brief description. I guess instead of trying to extract mechanical work from a Stirling engine, they are just removing heat from one area and piping it off elsewhere. They claim this uses no greenhouse depleting gases, and it sounds plausible to me.
What I find more interesting than the projected "energy" savings (which I would have to see the science and the experimental data before I'd bank on), is that there is no compressor to wear out, no refrigerants, etc. Conceivably a service call would be something on the order of "open the sound box, unclip the sound driver, put in a new one", right?
I wonder what the heat output on the hot side is -- enough to supply a home's hot water needs, perhaps?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Can I use it as a sub-woofer?
Har, har.
I've got nothing.
They arent gonna make a spits bit of difference in environmental saving of anything.Not when theres more to fear from farting and breathing of lifeforms and swamp gasses and other things we CANT DO ANYTHING REASONABLY ABOUT.Unless of course environmentalists would like to do their part by wearing buttplugs and to quit breathing.Now theres an idea!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Err 1990 calling Slashdot. Its been well over a decade since CFC were used as coolants in refrigerators. Hell the US Goverment have replaced CFC/ODS from ICBMs as it says here and other places.
So while its cool the Ozone bit is already being dealt with.
I still find it funny that something capable of killing millions of people is "Ozone friendly" apart of course from Ionising the atmosphere if it is used!
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion
...to Michael Jackson in that infamous Pepsi commercial when his hair went up in flames...
Support bacteria! It's the only culture most people seem to get.
This is the type of research that money should be spent on by the US government instead of making new laws, like forcing car companies to make SUV's use 1.5mpg less! If the government gave tax breaks and grants for stuff like this the effects would be greater than revamping old and current technology that is almost out of steam.
I'll still wait for the second generation of them though..I like my hair.
I didn't know what they were talking about when they said that it would be used to cool "ice cream".
I thought to myself, "How interesting. Cream made of ice, cooled with sound. I wonder what that means. Sounds exotic."
Then, when I saw the image, I was like, "Oh, ICE cream! What was I thinking? Thank GOD they had that image of ice cream to put me back on track!"
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Unfortunately, it was long ago (10+ years) back when I subscribed. Too bad they have no online archives I can search, or I'd give a link. The technology isn't really new, and makes a lot of sense, really (think what the compressor/condensor cycle does in traditional cooling, then think sound waves, think sonic booms, etc... lots of similarities there...).
All in all, neat stuff, though.
But then again, just as long as they discover a neural USB port, I'm happy.
Vhaaat a kuunntreee!
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
>> If successful, this technology would help remove the dependance on gases that contribute to global warming.
Last I heard of this, it also uses ridiculously more energy to achieve it's cooling. It's kind of like a sonic peltier.
So like many of these "eco-friendly" schemes, you just centralize the polution at the energy producer. Sure we save the use of a pint of freon (or whatever), but we produce 25x more CO2.
Anyone know if they've solved this? The article doesn't say.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Now when there's farting sounds in the room, I can point to the fridge when my wife gives me a scornful glance.
Oh, 174dB? The temperature knob definitely needs to go from 1-11.
Picture this. You're sat eating breakfast in your kitchen, in the background you hear a permanent loop of:
... "
"And on.. and on... and Gaviscon... da da da da DE da da da da
(I probably remembered the name wrong).
"Refrigerators To Cool With Sound"
So what. I live near the Capital of Washington State. We plan on heating our homes through the use of political speeches!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
very little info...but research is goin on at other places too..
Thermoacoustic Refrigerant Pilot
Sound is only produced within the compressed gas chamber, so I doubt it would be noticeable to humans. Animals might be another matter, though.
"We are far too easily pleased." --C.S. Lewis
Cooling with sound waves? I'm pretty sure my Athlon Palomino system already does this... Otherwise it wouldn't be so friggin LOUD.
I have been waiting for this for ages. I first read the paper by Backhaus and Swift (and here is a more recent one) four years ago, and whichever site that directed my attention to that "promised" commercialization in the near future. Not exactly swift in high tech time, but still very much welcomed.
Too bad I just bought a fridge for my dorm room. )=
Werd
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
Just dig a holw a few feet deep in the ground, and get a cool 4deg all year round.
Easy, didn't take any rocket science, doesn't produce green house gasses (maybe some radioactive ones), doesn't make any noise, doesn't cost much to run, only a space and a pick needed.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
But it's possible to use ANY compressable gas for cooling. The ones we use now are simply very efficient because they can store a lot of heat. There are several ways to make a cooling system more efficient (at removing heat) assuming you have not already taken the particular step to the maximum.
Of course there are two heat exchange systems in a typical refrigerator; Those inside which are intended to absorb heat, and those outside which radiate it. In a peltier-cooled system the same heat exchanger(s) do both jobs. You also end up needing some kind of heat sink to increase surface area since the thermally active portions of peltier coolers are flat.
By using some combination of these technologies we can move away from environmentally unsafe gases. While this new technology is certainly new and may be superior in many aspects, the only reason we have not moved to more efficient and/or "eco-friendly" designs to date is expense. Welcome to capitalist terra, my friends.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Though the BBC didn't get his name right (Garrett), I actually worked for his research lab at PSU. Very interesting stuff.
There's more information about other projects the group is working on here.
Incorporate a CD player (175db should be plenty loud) and a soda machine into the fridge and I'll be set for life!
Sound is only produced when the compressed gas chamber is sealed. They also mention producing heat from high-decibel sound, but not in relation to refridgerators.
"We are far too easily pleased." --C.S. Lewis
Yeah, that's great, except that an inrease in decibels represents an exponential increase in sound.
The dB scale is logarithmic, so a simple linear comparison doesn't work.
Unfortunately, this technology is only practical for use with very small systems. Sure, it might be able to cool a small ice cream cone, but this sort of system has no hope of scaling to the point that it cool 45 kg of groceries. Because of diminishing returns, the amount of power consumed would far outstrip the power needed for conventional Rankine cycle refrigeration units. However, this technology could be used in a laboratory to cool substances down to about -450 C. Very interesting indeed.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
If sound could REALLY cool things down, my wife could single-handedly counteract global warming. Yap, yap, yap.....
CFCs are not the cause for global warming, they're the cause for the hole in the ozone layer.
On the other hand, producing the sound waves will cost some electricity, the production of which is still mainly a main CO2 producer. So my idea is it will enhance the global warming, if anything.
i'm gonna wait until it plays my mp3s too
Their math is fine. Yours is quite suspect.
It doesn't say how energy efficient these things are. The gasses in your refrigerator typically stay trapped in the plumbing for decades. The gasses released by the power plant that makes your electricity don't. If these things are less efficient than current refrigerators, they could actually be worse for the environment.
Anybody out there know anything about the efficiency of this type of heat exchange?
The's a whole bunch of ways to cool things. It's just a matter of what works for a particular application.
Thermo-acoustic cooling has been considered for use in space to reduce the weight and mechanical complexity of traditional refrigeration systems. iirc, there was also the advantage of using less dangerous/toxic gasses with acoustic cooling.
Just imagine, like you (or just me?) used to tinker around with broken TVs even though you could get shocked...
Now you're tinkering with a broken old fridge that will DEAFEN you and LIGHT YOUR HAIR ON FIRE if you accidently connect it up while yougot the box taken apart...
If the idea does become commercial reality, I'll have to warn my kids... (Don't play with the fridge... it'll kill you).
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Decibels are logarithmic. A 20 dB sound is 10 times are powerful as a 10 dB sound. A 30 dB sound is 10 times as powerful as the 20 dB sound (and 100 times more powerful than the 10 dB one).
173 vs. 120 is more than 100000 times as powerful.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
We know exactly whats happening with that, just like we did with the Ozone. Damn hippies. ;)
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
First, for soundproofing the easiest method would be to place the sound source and the hot/cold plates in a "double, hollow walled box" evacuate most of the air between the hollow walls. This leaves no way for the sound waves to propogate outside the cooling unit. The cooling effect takes place outside of the hollow walled box because the fridge will still presumably circulate a fluid (which has absorbed heat in the refrigerator box through the cooling unit and back to the fridge/freezer. So there's wouldn't be a sound source even when the refridgerator is opened. Then put a sound sensor outside the box that shuts down the fridge if the vacumn fails and the sound rises above a certain level.
The second reason is that the current insulation in the refridgerator is still required --and the more the better-- to keep the heat from the rest of the world outside of the refrigerator or freezer box.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Global Cooling has been developing more efficient (and safer) CFC-free refrigeration and cooling (even cryo-cooling) systems for quite awhile, now.
=Smidge=
So let's see then (simple arithmatic)
...
173
-120
-----
53
Hardly what I would call "tens of thousands"
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question124.htm
"On the decibel scale, the smallest audible sound (near total silence) is 0 dB. A sound 10 times more powerful is 10 dB. A sound 100 times more powerful than near total silence is 20 dB. A sound 1,000 times more powerful than near total silence is 30 dB. Here are some common sounds and their decibel ratings:"
Decibel is a logarithmic scale, not a linear one.
So yes, 53db is 100,000x louder. Hundreds of thousands, actually.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
So don't stick your head in the fridge too much.
(/me suddenly thinks of a brillant diet plan involvong sound-based fridges)
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
"...intense noise can only be generated in the pressurised gas locked inside the cooling system."
I thought this was supposed to get rid of the gas? Did I miss something?
The decible scale is logarithmic, not linear
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
What did you say?
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
I asked if you'd like a cold beer.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Seriously though, I've seen a demo of this technology about 5-6 years ago and It's pretty cool.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
... the heat generated by the fridge. It's still more proportionately than the cooling it offers. Mark my words... global warming comes not from chloroflourocarbons (or however the hell you spell that), but from the heat let off by our refridgerators.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
WRONG!!!
Decibels are, by definition of "bels", on a LOG scale. It is based on Log 10:
dB = Log( I/I_0) * 10
where I is the Absolute Intensity in power/area, and I_0 a constant, which for sound is at 10^-12 Watt/Meter^2 (I think, or is it -10?)
So a db different of 53 translates to
10^(53/10) = 10^(5.3) which is approximately equal to 20 thousand times more intense.
Werd
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
Except the dB scale is logarithmic.
+3 dB = 2 x as loud
+10 dB = 10 x as loud
53 = 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 3 = 10*10*10*10*10*2 times as loud = 200000 times as loud. So actual its much more than "tens of thousands"
It nearly cracked my monitor.
Uh, IANA-Scientist, but..
Isn't the Decibel scale logarithmic not linear?
It uses Helium which is very expensive compared to other cooling mediums. The engine is probably expensive too.
Cryogenic systems use Helium because of its efficiency.
Industrial systems use Ammonia (NH3) because it is very cheap and harmless to the atmosphere. The machinery is however more expensive/complicated than Freon systems.
[...]even if the fridge cracks open the vast sounds generated within will not escape because the intense noise can only be generated in the pressurised gas locked inside the cooling system.
and
The pair are hoping that their work will end reliance on the gases [...]
Seems counter productive to me.
Yeah, I can just imagine eating dinner with the family:
Me: So, how was your day?
Mother: What?
Me: I said, how was your day?
Mother: WHAT? I can't hear you!
Me: HOW - WAS - YOUR - DAY?
Mother: OH! IT WAS GOOD! WE GOT THE NEW FRIDGE TODAY!
and obviously, chip cooling. I always thought loud music was cool.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
This will probably be moded down, but give me a break. Global warming is a farse.
It's getting harder to read Slashdot due to the liberal bias. Come on people, wise up, get your nose into the real world and out of your 24 hour cyber life!
No time to log-in
Quicker
"Dude! Turn up the beer cooler to 11!"
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
this will be really good for deaf fat people
It was developed at Los Alamos.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Thought this article might provide some interesting background on thermoacoustics.
At ridiculous volumes and/or frequencies, sound has some amazingly powerful properties, but I'm skeptical as to how practical such a technology can be. Here's why:
A professor at my university was doing some personal research with a small team at his house on the properties of high-decibel sound. Based on incredibly complex differential equations, one could project two sound waves at ridiculously high frequencies and volumes to create a special kind of interference. This interference would in essence start a new sound (at a hearable frequency/volume) from where the two waves intersected, effectively making it seem like a controlled sound was being created out of thin air at any point in 3d-space.
I don't think I need to point out applications to this technology. BUT - he decided to discontinue the project before it was ever completed. He had several pets in his house (dog + cats) that he tried to keep away from the testing, but they were still being driven crazy by the sound. He also started developing nasty headaches and suspected that his high-range hearing was being destroyed.
Interestingly, one of the graduate students who worked with him on the project decided to continue the work on his own. From what I've heard, he had his work picked up and funded by the US military (DARPA, I think). When I heard this, it really didn't come as a surprise.
Experts agree: everything is fine.
Maybe this technology can be used to cool PCs, it'll probably be more effective than a heatsink and fan.
Just connect some B&w speakers and some Krell amps and your done.
Los Alamos national lab currently holds the record on using thermal acoustic engine. The thermal efficient of their engine is about 30 percent, compare that to automobile engine. which is about 25 percent. http://www.lanl.gov/projects/thermoacoustics/TASHE .html
Decibels aren't on a linear scale. Your 53db is a logrithmic difference. Every 3db in difference is a doubleing of intensity. 123db is twice as intense as 120db. So 53/3 = 17.6667 which means 173db is 2^17.6667 times as loud as 120db. Which is actually 208063.83 times as loud. Which means the article was still wrong. Here's a link about decibel math: here.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
Naval Postgraduate school did this---even solar powered it. Those darn navy guys...T ADTAR.pdf
. mil/hofler/stadta r.htm
PDF: http://phserver.physics.nps.navy.mil/hofler/asa/S
and even cooler (pun intended), a beer cooler powered by solar *heating* and thermoelectric.
http://phserver.physics.nps.navy
I can use my chillout albums to cool my food!
So how does one go about creating 173 db worth of sound? I saw no mention of how they did that. Im guessing that AC/DC isnt chilling in the back anywhere...
Of course, it helps to know that the decibel system is based on logarithms. A quick look in a physics textbook or a quick Internet search will show you that a difference of 3dB signifies a doubling of power!! So yes, 173dB is actually about 208,000 times more intense than 120dB!
Even though I think Global Warming is a myth and the ozone hole is a joke I think this is very kewl. Plus this will last longer then the old fridges.
This is the thing the hippies don't get: To actually decrease our use of oil a better product must be developed. Example, Very few care about solar or electic cars that can't hit 85+ mph. A pollution free car is worthless if no one can\will use it. If someone developed a SUV that got 50 miles per gallon I would be the first to buy it, but until then I will keep my Explorer.
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
Unfortunately, for those who have basements underneath their kitchens, you'd have to explain why there is a trap door and ladder where the old fridge used to be...
And if you wanted a freezer, you'd have to wait until winter, as burrowing further down won't help much =)
I make up for the lack of fridge in my dorm room by putting my drinks near the cold, uninsulated windows. Works pretty well.
How about we use glass doors on our refrigerators, the kind that have two panes and a vacume betweem them. This way we wouldnt have to open the door so much. Duh!
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
Well I'll just wait until it comes with Ogg Vorbis support before they get MY money!
--
refregerators are one thing, but I see this being a good application for roof mounted HVAC equipment. which is noisy anyways and are usually mounted in remote locations. This also applies to most commercial walk freezers/coolers. They all use a remotely mounted condencing (cooling) unit. My biggest questions are 1.) weight 2.) power consumption. I imagine this would remove the need for a compresser and radiator type vents making it lighter.
Can the fridge play my .OGG files???
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Let us ask a question - Why does a helium balloon float?
This effect is due to the helium atoms being lighter than there surrounding atoms so the balloon gets pushed up (think effect of air bubbles in water if it helps).
Now, since this is why things float - and the ozone is approx. 100 miles or so above the surface of the earth, let us ask the real question: How can CFC's (carbon chain molecule with florine) being much heavier than air float up to that altitute?
You know what I want? A fridge built into my countertop that pneumatically raises up at the touch of a button, leaving all the cold air still down in the refrigeration pit. It'd work just like your adjustable office chair. Yes, I know it would be a pain to clean when your cat knocks half a jug of juice down there, but isn't that a price worth paying?
Think about it... *whoooosh*... makes those 1950's techno-utopian dreams look almost attainable!
Wah!
The sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert.
Bah! That's nothing! My brother had a Stereo in a Ford Ranger that did 176dB!
His truck *was* pretty cool, though, so who knows? Maybe this could work.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Sounds cool but what level of compression will it use? I insist on 256 kbps using ogg.
LOL
Unless it is cheaper there's hardly any point.
it cools, yet it is a fire hazard?!?!
Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
There was another company called Cool Chip LLC that can be found over at http://www.pinksheets.com which claims to have produced a chip which, using electron tunnelling (as I recall) to create an ultra-efficient means of cooling using banks of these chips. In short they take a small amount of electricity and convert it using the tunnelling technique to cool air. They are also in the process of making it work in reverse, where heat alone could produce electricity. Apparently they demoed it to Boeing. Links to the articles should be available both at the Pink Sheets website and somewhere on Slashdot an article about this was posted, but I can't find it now.
Memories become legend, Legend fades to myth, and even myth is forgotten by the time that age comes again.-Robert Jordan
If you are interested in this technology, google for thermoacoustic refrigeration or refrigerator. Apparently this is not as new as the article makes it out to be.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
"1. ...Of course it does raise the cost of opening the refrigerator door, in comparison to the cost ratio now. ..."
Now we get to one of my pet peeves. Why doesn't any of the major, or minor for that matter, fridge manufactures make a chest style fridge. There are many chest style deep freezes, but no fridges. With a chest style fridge you'd only loose very little of the cold air in it when you opened it, rather than dumping darn near every bit of cold air out onto the floor as with the cabinet style fridges.
Just my $0.02
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
That's just asking for it to break.
I think the price of buying new lead-filled motors every year would offset any benefit of such a system.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Global warming is BS.
How old is the earth, and how long has man kept records on temps? It may very well be natural for the earth to warm up, For all we know the records may of started on the bottom of a natural cool period, and we are just now warming up to normal.
And since we're now using electricity to cool the fridge, we're burning coal to make the electricity to cool the fridge. At least we won't have to worry about any harmful gasses from those coal-burning electricity plants...
Could a Beowulf cluster of these refrigerators be used to cool the Earth and stop global warming?
Who is against global warming anyway? I hate cold weather and snow!
... in the physics department, Julian Maynard works on thermoacoustic refrigeration. He does some pretty neat stuff. (I went to a talk where he was telling us how he was determining resonant modes in a quasicrystalline lattice. Instead of trying to solve the quantum mechanical Schroedinger equation analytically or numerically, he experimentally built a simulation of the quasicrystal by cutting out appropriately-shaped metal plates, putting tuning forks on them, and wiring the forks together to couple neighboring "crystals". He arranged it so the classical resontant modes of the simulated system would duplicate the quantum eigenstates of the real system, and just experimentally measured the normal modes.) He's always desperate for graduate students and has tons of funding to spare, because acoustics can be lucrative, but isn't trendy.
I believe the new gases (e.g. Puron) are more efficient at this than Freon. I have a new air conditioner that uses Puron. It runs considerably quieter and uses less electricity.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Rooms drop a good 10 degrees every time I ask a girl out in bar...at least it seems that way.
Gives a whole new meaning to "chillin' vibes". Sorry :)
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
It creates heat energy... I wonder if it can be tapped off to create hot water so you can have hot & cold water spigot on your fridge with your icemaker. Kinda like what you find on a water fountain. Make ice tea off the front of your refrigerator without having to turn on the stove (or the coffee maker, or the microwave, etc).
"I drank what?" - Socrates
geez -- go read the article before posting please
the sound can't get out of the heat exchange box
because it's transmitted through a special pressurized
gas of some sort.
if the seal is broken, the gas depressurizes, and
it's not possible to produce the 175+ db of sound
anymore. (it's probably still pretty loud though)
Sweet, now I can cool down my plasma bean burritos straight out of the microwave!
We all know that ultra low frequencies can cause your bowels to, well, kick in and empty out, right? I wonder if you can buy a package deal - combo 'fridge/toilet. Kick in a TV, padded/heated seat on the toilet, and you've pretty much just created the ultimate guy Christmas present.
Rosie O'Donnel used in first on her television show.
Toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
</wierding-module>
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Does this mean that the RIAA will be seeking royalties for each item I stick in my sound-powered fridge?
It's a joke--you're supposed to laugh now.Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion.
/. in a long, long time.
This is the coolest thing that I've read on
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Great... Just when I had finally managed to get my computer nice and quiet, they came up with a way to make the fridge louder...
I wonder though, if this could be used, or how logical it would be, to apply this to computers, especially as we get faster, and the processors temperatures get hotter. Perhaps instead of purchasing fans most computers will come with an audio coolant system standard?...
Anybody have an idea how loud these things are?
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
I've often wondered why a two piece conventional freon refrigerator never caught on. You could place the compressor, condenser, and the support structure outside the house connected with two hoses (same as your whole house AC). This would eliminate most of the internal noise and be far more efficient as you are not releasing the hot air from inside the fridge + the electrical and mechanical losses into the house. In the fall through spring season cycle it would even be more an advantage as it is often much cooler outside then in the house and the compressor could even be bypassed. This would allow for smaller, quiter, and higher efficiency refrigerators and allow more flexibility as you could replace the inside and outside units seperately when and if needed. The inital conversion would be a little higher because you'd have to run lines and a concrete pad or wall hanging device outside but long term it would be much less. Installation in new construction would be simple. Anyone have some VC money they want to get rid of?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I believe it was Jeff Foxworthy, part of his "You might be in Soviet Russia" act.
in the sciam article they explain this bit... apparently the dB scale is logarithmic
... refrigerator owners in Finland have been court ordered to pay royalties for the sounds generated by the space-age technology inside of their appliances. These royalties multiply depending on how many people are in the kitchen at the time. Hillary Rosen of the RIAA was quoted as saying "First they pirate our music, now they're cooling their food with it? Lots of people everywhere owe us money!"
use REALLY loud speakers.
Then go to a lan party where you can frag your neighbor with 173 decibels. That would be coooooooool.
"Ozone Depeletion and global warming are two different issues."
It's CO2 emissions that are allegedly a major factor in global warming. Unless your fridge is gasoline powered, this is not an issue.
And CFCs have already been banned. I though /. was on the bleeding edge?
ObSheesh: Sheesh!
--- Ban humanity.
I feel compelled to lay to rest all of these posts about people going deaf from these refrigerators...
Thankfully, even if the fridge cracks open the vast sounds generated within will not escape because the intense noise can only be generated in the pressurised gas locked inside the cooling system.
Think about it for a moment. To generate the 120 dB in front of the speakers at a rock concert, you need some serious wattage. Those are powerful blasters, my friends. Also realize that the Decibel scale is logarithmic, meaning that the amount of "sonic energy" or volume -- whatever you want to call it -- between say 20 and 30 dB is a lot less than the amount between 120 and 130 dB. We're talking about a difference between 120 and 173 dB, which is, as the article points out, "tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert." I'm not a physicist or anything, but I'd assume that's why the sounds generated in the cooling unit work within a highly pressurized atmosphere -- so the sounds can (1) be created more efficiently and (2) carry through the gas properly. Open the unit into normal air and I don't believe it works anymore -- the atmosphere is too thin to produce those kinds of levels. On top of that, the unit is probably insulated in a vacuum anyhow, so as to prevent sound from escaping.
You won't go deaf. Your animals won't go crazy. The most you'll probably ever hear is a soft hum.
On Slashdot, we don't say "thank you." We say "that's enough..." -_-;
Refrigerants cause holes in the ozone... no connection to Global Thawing. Gonna burn your ass with UV while the temp goes up enough to bake bread in your shorts whilst you sit in the shade of your gas guzzling moped.
didn't take any rocket science, doesn't produce green house gasses, doesn't make any noise, doesn't cost much to run, ...doesn't work worth a darn anywhere useful.
Assuming that 4deg is Celsius (Only a few places on Earth - mostly covered with ice - where that might be Fahrenheit), you're still talking about pretty high latitudes. 4C == 40F, but most temperate latitudes the constant ground temperature is more like 50F - 55F, getting warmer as you approach the tropics. Not cold enough for a fridge (typically 4C/40F), and you'd have to dig more than just "a few feet" anyway.
Unless you live in Greenland.
-- Alastair
I can't recall what vehicle it was, but an experimental luxury car had two of these type of units integrated for the back seat. They were built into the headliner of the roof and (obviously) fired downwards, with the nifty effect of producing sound audible by the person below it but nowhere else. I'm not sure if it ever entered mass-production. At any rate, the theory was the same, where the interference between ultrasonic sound waves created an audible result. Aside from the aiming problems I believe the biggest issue was poor fidelity, as it was difficult to reproduce the full range of frequencies necessary for music with this technique.
say... wasn't this the story of a movie?
_ ge nius.htm
something like the one with the space laser some
college kids redirected to the professor's house
and ended up destroying with popcorn?
http://www.dvdmoviecentral.com/ReviewsText/real
Global Cooling on the otherhand produce rival products to Medis El based on the Free piston Stirling Engine.
Despite being some impressive technology, Free Piston Stirling Engines haven't really been taken up to well. Its a shame because they do seem to be much more efficient.
If you are really interested then you might want to check this out At Ames Lab. Gschneidner's work on the giant magnetocaloric effect is REALLY impressive. Its all about the exchange of entropy between magnetic and kinetic forms. Damn cool.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
Now FINALLY I can build those weirding modules!
I'm sure there is a dB for getting one's organs to burst too!
Artaxerxes
By using some combination of these technologies we can move away from environmentally unsafe gases. While this new technology is certainly new and may be superior in many aspects, the only reason we have not moved to more efficient and/or "eco-friendly" designs to date is expense. Welcome to capitalist terra, my friends.
It's not as though expense can be omitted from the equation entirely. Cheap and easily produced refrigeration technology (and air conditioning, which is closely related) have probably prevented more illnesses than any recent development since antibiotics.
"The research is being sponsored by ice cream makers Ben & Jerry's and Unilever. "
"Humans feel pain when they hear sounds of 120 decibels, a level typically reached next to the speakers at a rock concert."
So the purpose of this research is to improve on the ice cream headache? Why?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
If successful, this technology would help remove the dependance on gases that contribute to global warming. Talk about Cool!
Talk about cool? Haha, you guys get that one?!?! haha... sorry =P
opps, got caught out be the french again.....
Well, a hole in the ground was good enough for a few thousand years or so, so I'm sure it's good enough now.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
First the "scientists" say the earth is getting warmer... Then a couple cold winters, and they say that the global warming is causing colder winters. Then it's causing less rain/snow fall, now we're getting more snow than last year.
The impact that everything humans have done can be easily toppled by a couple volcanos. I'm really getting sick of everyone from CEO's to environmentalists only looking at the near past and near future. It's causing kneejerk reactions to everything from 'this week's' profits, to 'this month's' temperatures. Everything has to be done now, stopped now, started now, fixed now. Until someone can give me the average weekly temerature report from when Mr. & Mrs. Dinosaur were releasing greenhouse gasses after munching some stinkweed in a swamp, I have a hard time believing that their constantly chaning opinions and "findings" are accurate.
That's my rant, go ahead and moderate this down a bit.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
I am so going to crack one of these babies open for the amplifier and start my own band.
I think I'll call it...
DISASTER AREA!
A: Then you better go catch it!
If anyone has more info than the PR-babble on both sites, I would appreciate that.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
First, for soundproofing the easiest method would be to place the sound source and the hot/cold plates in a "double, hollow walled box" evacuate most of the air between the hollow walls. This leaves no way for the sound waves to propogate outside the cooling unit. The cooling effect takes place outside of the hollow walled box because the fridge will still presumably circulate a fluid (which has absorbed heat in the refrigerator box through the cooling unit and back to the fridge/freezer. So there's wouldn't be a sound source even when the refridgerator is opened. Then put a sound sensor outside the box that shuts down the fridge if the vacumn fails and the sound rises above a certain level.
I actually came to the same conclusion, but ran into one problem with it: The heat exchanger. At some point the heat exchanger is going to have to contact the metal plates in the sound tube. Thermodynamics being what they are, the most efficent way for the cooled metal plates to suck heat out is going to be through conduction with the fluid (possibly through a interum medium, such as a heat sink). Just cooling the metal plates and waiting for radiation to transfer the heat through a near vaccum is going to be slow, very slow.
So now we have a heat exchanger, contacting the plates in the sound tube, the exchanger and contained fluid (if they use one) come into contact with both the air and the rest of the the fridge. making for one nice sounding board.
On the upshot though, you could use nylon fasteners to mount the exchanger system, thus isolating it a bit, and also a bit of insulation around the heat exchanger, except where it must be exposed, could go a long way to damping the sound. Also, as the article mentioned the system uses a gas under pressure to propagate the sound at the desired level, so even if there is some vibration transfered out through the heat exchange system, it may not generate much more noise than a current fridge.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
The primary problem with CFCs is that they destroy the ozone layer, not their contribution to global warming. The two problems are rather different from one another. The destruction of the ozone layer is already a serious problem in some parts of the world, while global warming has not become such a big problem--yet.
At about 6' down the ground temperature is roughly equal to the average yearly temperature of your location. If that is 4 degrees where you live then you dont have much of a summer do you?
Any child of the 80's knows that "In Soviet Russia" was Yakov Smirnov's schtick!
Now get out of my comic book store!
But -- it's really COOL -- because it's a refrigerator!!
Feces -> Trousers
Oh Slashdot, ye layout look like crud. Thou art the grounds of many a flame-war and the grounds where many a brave troll stood. With many a great postings and tales we may deem tall, you cheerfully bring news from the techworld, faithfully, to us all.
Here, Here!
I remember it pretty vividly. The demo unit they had was installed into a counter top. "Opening" the fridge consisted of pressing a button on the counter top, and a circular set of racks rose up out of the counter top.
"This refrigerator is really environmentally friendly..."
"What?"
"It cools through the use of extremely loud accoustical waves..."
"WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?"
"At first I was worried it would affect my hearing..."
"I CAN'T HEAR YOU! WHAT'S WITH THE NOISY FRIDGE?"
The researchers were using this CD in their initial studies.
Surgens general warning: Opening the refrigerator may cause strange noises.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Cold fusion has been reproduced by three labs using a Kenmore room fridge.
The discovery was made by chemistry students who accidentally let the pressurized gas out of their acoustic beer cooler and replaced it with the only thing they had on hand a tank of pressurized deuterium. Since the tone producing chip ( a common 555 timer ) of the fridge was smashed by the same idiot who fell over and knocked the tube assembly and the students were too plastered to drive to Radio Shack, the students routed Aretha Franklin's famous R.E.S.P.E.C.T track through the sound circuitry creating fusion.
The three cooked ramen noodles on the heat exchanger of their fridge and smoked some weed but were suprised when the tuble started to glow red and finally burst making a small hydrogen fireball in their dorm room.
The next day the students were all very sick and were admitted to the hospital where they were diagnosed with radiation sickness. Sadly the two that sat in the room next to the cooking noodles died within 48 hours, but the third went back into the room and studied the device. Under more controlled circumstances, he has found that other CDs do not produce neutrons or excess energy and that fusion doesn't start until the first round of 'Sock it to me Sock it to mes'
Eat at Joe's.
Power it with Vanilla Ice so at least some vanilla ice is cool!
f64 : crack remarks since 1978 (the year crack was invented).
Actually if the housing containing the driver is ruptured it will still remain quiet because compressed gas is required for the loud noise.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Noone can say "Is your refrigerator running" in their prank calls anymore. Anyone who could answer "no" to that question would have their face melted off and therefore would be unable to answer the phone in the first place.
200000 times as loud. So actual its much more than "tens of thousands"
Not really; it's 20 tens of thousands.
ooh, you can make the glass door a giant lcd or any one of those technologies used to make shading windows. This way you can have an opaque fridge, until you want to take a peek. To be honest, I don't want to see my moldy cheese to be so easily visible.
narbey
-- "The evil stops here" -Petr
I was wondering what that annoying sound on campus was
Finkployd
PSU Programmer
Now we get to one of my pet peeves. Why doesn't any of the major, or minor for that matter, fridge manufactures make a chest style fridge.
I don't understand your question. All refrigerators are chest style; they only set them on one end in the store so they'll occupy less space. Oh, wait--you aren't one of those idiots that installed it that way when you got it home, are you? Hahahahaha!!! How stupid can you get? I'll bet you put CD's in your PC's cupholder slot too, don't you?
What a moron!
A small team of 10 or so in conjunction with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory built a thermo-acoustic refridgerator. It didn't work to well but it sure did make a hell of alot of noise. :)
Our most successful aspect of the project was the prototyping of the stack. We discovered that a form of carbon areogel had some very cool properties that made isolating the heat exchanges easy. To test the new stack we created a "hooter-tube" (or holfer tube) which is the opposite of the refridgerator. We created a difference in temeperature to generate sound. We dipped one end of the tube in liqued nitrogen and then heated the other end with a blow dryer. It was a blast to play with becuase it was about the size of a light saber and becuase the open end was the cold end the air around the tip would condense and allow you to "see" the sound wave (well, a quarter of it anyway).
here are some photos and other stuff:
photo of hooter tube
photo of working refridgerator (very similar to ours)
Navy page with lots of info
BUNNY OF DEATH!
Certainly expensive refrigeration wouldn't solve problems for the impoverished. Of course lots of people in the world STILL don't have refrigeration, which (as anyone who has played civilization 2 knows) lets you produce more food because you can store/transport more.
On the other hand for most of the world it makes sense to purchase initially expensive refrigeration hardware because it will save on costs in the long run. It regularly pisses me off that it is generally impossible to get a refrigerator with a basic set of features (IE, no ice maker/crusher, no water spigot, no computer in the door) without industrial-quality insulation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On the other hand if the gas is compressed farther it will be able to accept more heat, so you should be able to get a more rapid heat transfer
Sorry, it's been a few years since I had thermogoddamics, but I'm not sure this is correct. The heat transfer uses ENTHALPIC heat, which is given up or absorbed when the material changes state. In other words, Freon (ammonia, whatever) absorbs heat when it changes from a liquid to a gas, and vice versa. You compress the gas JUST ENOUGH to change its state to liquid, compressing it further has no effect (besides, compressing liquids isn't really practical anyway.) I believe what makes the Freon family so suitable for heat exchanging applications isn't it's enthalpic heat capacity, but the temperatures and pressures at which it changes state, i.e. practical in real-world terms. For example a compound that changed from gas to liquid at 2000 PSI at -140C wouldn't really be useful for much of anything. Some substances don't go through the liquid stage at all at practical pressures (carbon dioxide)... they go straight from gas to solid (and vice versa). Hard to pump a solid through a heat exchanger.
Anyway, you made some great points, but the solutions may not be as practical or simple as you suggested.
And I didn't see any mention in the article of what kind of compressed gas was used in the sound chamber.... Freon maybe? haha.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
That would be coooooooool
In more ways than one, at least according to the article.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
So long they don't have singing fruit or vegtables in mind.
Heat engines convert temperature -differences- into mechanical energy. If you plop one inside a furnace, it'll just sit there getting warm. Reversible in this case means that you can convert mechanical energy into a temperature difference, and so it can be used as either a heat pump or as a refrigeration unit, depending on which end of the output you're interested in.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
I find this very interesting as a similar or maybe the same technology was in one of the science magazines 10 Years ago! Also there is a new technology on the books that promises a chip the size of a pack of cigarettes that could cool a refrigerator with only 1/4 the energy. See it at http://www.coolchips.com Sam
Trivia question...
You have a helium balloon in a car. You step on the gas. What happens to the balloon and why?
I scream, you scream, this fridge screams to cool ice cream.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Cold storage: cooling phase change materials by running the cooling system at night, then using the cold material for daytime cooling (lower nighttime electric rates, better efficiencies due to cooler nighttime air temp)
e .h tm
t yd evice.html
. ht m
/ ho mes/inside/windows/future.html
m u3 3v.html
http://www.cogeneration.net/thermalenergystorag
Using high efficiency solid state thermionics for no-moving-parts cooling:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/electrici
Storing nighttime coolness in phase change materials embedded in drywall:
http://doityourself.com/wall/phasechangedrywall
Windows which can switch on and off to reject or transmit infrared radiation:
http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/homeandwork
CO2 based automobile air conditioning system:
http://www.spacedaily.com/2002/021204065123.7v5
However it's not necessarily necessary :) to convert all the way to a liquid. If that's the way Freon works, it's neat to know and my hat is off to you.
Oh yeah I forgot another way to increase the efficiency of a refrigerator; increase the airflow over one or another of the heat exchangers. I thought of this because the issue of converting to a liquid made me think of automotive intercoolers (which are compressing air which as you know is mostly nitrogen and oxygen and obviously not compressing it to a liquid.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At last, a fridge that goes to ELEVEN.
My computer is already cooled by sound waves. If you don't believe me, come on over and have a listen.
I guess why my CPU hasn't melted yet, is because the cooling fan is churning out 173dB. That could explain why I'm deaf...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"The coldest temperature we have achieved with this test rig is eight degrees below zero--well below the freezing point of water," Garrett says.
Well since this is on a website with SCIENCE in the title, I think they mean Celcius.
BUT is also has American in the title.
I think my head is gonna explode! If it doesn't, I'll apply for a job at NASA.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
That is a "cool" idea.
Penn State!
Joe Pa rules!
-- -1 for gratuitous Collage Football ranting
...would be large scale building ventilation chillers. The problems associated with having a noisy refrigerator could be ignored if you instead used this technology to provide cooling for an office or apartment building. HVAC chillers and their associated pumps already make lots of noise, so another humming noise won't make much of a difference. Plus, the fewer moving parts would make chiller manufacturers happy; less maintenance to do.
The article does mention that in these sound tubes, half the plates get hot and half get cold. It doesn't mention how hot these plates get. Perhaps they could be used for heating. Then a building mechanical equipment room could be much smaller; instead of having a chiller and a boiler, you could have just one rack of these sound tubes, a hot water heat exchanger, and a cold water heat exchanger.
I always knew Drew Carey was ahead of his time with BZZZ Beer!
falls in the forest, and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
bullshitting creatively. You know, just like everyone else
:) to convert all the way to a liquid.I guess I forgot more thermo than I originally thought. You're right, I wasn't thinking. But, in fact, it's more efficient to use the enthalpic heat thingy for common refrigeration and a/c applications, so they do. I tried to google up some specific facts but hard info seemed fairly difficult to come by. I did find a meaningless PDF buried on DuPont's site someplace but it didn't seem particularly quotable. Maybe tomorrow I'll check howshitworks.com or something, probably while I'm looking for nits to pick in somebody else's post. Guffaw. :-)
I resemble that remark. haha.
However it's not necessarily necessary
I was glad they capped the karma, I never could get above 49 anyway. Some arsewipes kept modding my humor as "offtopic" and "flamebait". Go figger.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Yeah, they are working on a refrigerator with military funding. If they can cool with sound, how long before they make a sound cannon / freezer gun?
Go for it. They can always use people who can't be bothered with units of measure. I think they have a few more space probes they need to crash into planets.
I believe this phenomena has already been well-described in the science documentary "Rock and Roll High School".
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
This research made some noise (ha!) about ten years ago. A company called Macrosonix holds the patents. Even NPR has covered this in the past ten years.
The best explanation of the technology I've seen is in "Fluid Power Journal."
Since they don't mention the gas they're using.. instead of ruining the ozone, now we've got some mystery gas leaking into the atmosphere when the fridge breaks!
Wonder how long it is until cheese eating highschool kids figure out a way to get high off it.
This was on slashdot before. The device was invented by a guy at MIT, and he's now running a company selling them commercially:
Holosonics (Audio Spotlight manufacturer)
Looks like there are several automotive companies using them, as well as lots of exhibitors and whatnot. Really cool stuff.
the hottest and/or coolest music should always be played as loud as possible.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Marketing guy: Great! So we have Michael Jackson as a customer. Who else are we going to sell this thing to?
**RIMSHOT**
Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all week!
That is all.
...why not devise a way to bring in cold air from outside, piped into the fridge? Surely this won't work for places like Floriduh, but where I live (and right now, much of America and Canada) are cool enough to save a few dollars in power costs, and reduce or eliminate the chemicals. Only question is where to get the cold air during the summer? The earth, of course. I'm going to try it. If it works I'll try it on my computers.
I'm holding out for a fridge that cools with lasers, so I can make up a batch of Bose-Einstein condensate whenever I need some.
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
In case you missed it, the Montreal Protocol banned Production of Freeon in 1990. Most cooling units built today use a non-ozone depleting chemical relative of Freeon. Actually there are a couple of them. So while it might be "cool" and "SUPERDOOPERLOUD", its a solution looking for a problem.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
CFCs and their replacements, HCFCs and HFCs, are all tremendously potent greenhouse gases. They have global warming potentials several thousand times that of carbon dioxide. The ozone problem is pretty much solved because global CFC production has dropped to near zero following the implementation of international treaties to protect the ozone layer. However, the global warming potential of HFC and HCFC replacements is worthy of concern.
Global warming is caused by the sun.
Just as it is true that global warming is caused by the sun, so my body generates most of the heat that keeps me warm. Nonetheless, if I wear too many sweaters, I will get too hot. Taking them off will cool me down, despite the fact that the heat is all coming from my own body. The same principle applies to the atmosphere. The earth's temperature is determined by a radiative balance. We can't change the sun, but we can change the atmosphere (our sweater), and that can cause the earth's temperature to change.
This seems nifty and all, but how efficient can it be? I have no idea how much juice the typical concert PA system uses, but I'll bet it's more than my fridge. I'd love to have one though - It would be neat if I could shoot a hole in it and suddenly have a couple of locomotive horns going off in the kitchen, making people's hair catch on fire and so on...
What I would really like to see is a house designed around a centralized heat reservoir. Dump the heat generated by your Fridge and your AC into a stack where your water heater, your over, and your Heater can pull from. Obviously you'd also want a heating element there, but the energy savings of recouping the heat from the other applicances would be significant.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Yes!! This is exactly the grad student I was talking about. From the Holosonics site you linked, in the "technology" section:
...
While a graduate student developing '3D Audio' at Northwestern University in the late 1990's, Joseph Pompei had similar ideas of using ultrasound as a loudspeaker
He doesn't give credit to any specific people at Northwestern, but as I recall he did most of the work anyway. Interesting!
Experts agree: everything is fine.
I can't remember the name of the program, but it was one of those "Look what's new in science" type programs on the Discovery Channel. On this one I remember, I saw them talking about a sonic fridge. This was 10 years ago. They had a prototype 10 years ago. What happened to that?
HELLO?
Is your refrigerator running?
WHAT?!?
Is your refrigerator running?
WHAT?!? YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP!
Oh nevermind.. *click*
I always wondered when they would invent the *macrowave* oven...
"You have liberated me from thought."
Hmm, no units, maybe it's Kelvin. That would be really impressive. :)
I read the internet for the articles.
Are you telling me that This. Is. New?
God i believe even NASA got in on the R&D for this years ago. That said, i'll be glad when this actually gets into the market place, though i am concerned about a few saftey and energy concervation issues.
:-)
Ged68
You would still have to generate the sound, and guess what they use...electricity. So much for...
"The pair are hoping that their work will end reliance on the gases currently used in fridges that can contribute to global warming." They will merely trade one problem for another. Basically unsound, pun intended , engineering. Burning of fossil fuels to make electricity...greenhouse shit. Pollution. Inefficiency. Stupidity. Cuntlickers, oops OT.
Now my fan can be utilized to actually cool my computer!
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
I think 281 degrees Kalvin below the freezing point of water is so impressive, that it just might be impossible ;-)
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Which is where the hot water idea came into play: I've seen a couple of test modifications where a tinkerer wrapped a heat exchanger around the refridgerator's hot coils and at least partially heated his home water supply.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Yeah, but if I were to crash them into planets, imagine how cold they'd get after their impact energy dissipated?
They wouldn't even have to be working on this new refrigeration technology, if we could just cool stuff by storing it on Mars or the Moon.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I want a laser cooling system! Who needs these wimpy 273.15K cooling systems I want a nice 0.0001K so I can preserve my food forever.
Patrik
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
This has all already been done. All new refidgerators and freezers are very quiet compared to even just a decade ago. They are very well insulated and they are not using potentially ozone destroying gasses. They are also more energy efficient than ever before! In fact the peltier junctions don't really have an edge any more on efficiency and they still cost considerablby more than a traditional system.
All in all the current state of refirdgeration is actually quite good. This idea is simply an interesting science experiment, but practically speaking it is not needed nor useful or practical (heh).
"Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating..."
Ok, that was just too cool a fact NOT to include in the article.
my cube has a window...
by stocking less baked beans in the fridge!
ba-da-bsh.
Why would you want Internet Explorer in your refrigerator? Although Mozilla's Tab(TM) feature may significantly reduce your soft drink selection...
Let's play the devil's advocate for a moment. Let's also ignore the very small number of lifeforms (including humans) who covert energy from geothermic heat. What are we left with? Lifeforms converting energy from the sun. We (or a plant we eat) will store this energy in our bodies for later use. When we run a mile in heavy clothing, some of this stored energy is coverted into heat (damn Thermodynamics!), and trapped by our clothing. The heat builds up and makes us uncomfortable.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch (remember the role you were supposed to be playing) to see how global warming, and the "human overwarming problem" can be easily solved by unplugging the sun.
So they finally invent a system that isn't so FSCKING LOUD!
Oh, wait. 173dB? Ah, nevermind.
Many large scale a/c systems produce chilled water for cooling the air. Sometimes the chilled water gets circulated, for example for conditioning areas. This water would also provide a convenient media for dumping the surplus heat from a refrigerator. It still remains two stage, but there isn;t the air buffer between the stages.
Turn that fridge down!
The article claims that 165dB is sufficient to cool a refrigerator - my neighbour's daughter exceeds that by a long shot. Does this mean we can put her inside a tube and get her to keep my beer cold?
wtf, I saw this report and the proto-tech on Beyond 2000 like 6 or 7 years ago. And for it to be on that retired program would mean it had to have been close to a year or two old.
;-)
I guess now that we're 'Beyond 2000' its okay to reproduce near-decade old hype without copyright infringement fears.
But let me know when I can cool my beer with a speaker.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
It would really be nice if reporters would bone up on this stuff and give us the science and the facts, not hearsay.
For lots more debunking of just about every "science" fad, check this out.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Even more evidence that the whole controversy over global warming is junk science.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
I'm not aware that the warming of Alaska would ever be bad, but of course, some people might think so. The problem is that local warming in Alaska isn't part of a global trend, and that carbon dioxide isn't the cause of global warming.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
You missed using a more efficient compressor. Quite important because as I understand LG now have a linear compressor that is apparently 50% more efficient that the standard compressor (if a bit more noisy). Think about it for a moment, a linear
magnetic motor pushes the piston one way compressing
the refegerant and then pulls it back doing the same
again. Cuts out all those mechanical losses of going from circlar motion to linear in standard compressors.
My fridge surfs the web! ;)
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
My uncle is a science teacher at the McGehee school in North Carolina. He and his students calculated that the mass of the air inside of a refrigerator is about that of a grapefruit.
It's the same reason the temperature is different near the coast, or the ocean is still cold when the days are hot; air doesn't hold on to heat very well, at least not as well as ocean water...or grapes. Your refrigerator is much more efficient when it is full than when it is empty, because the food holds its temperature better than the air. Leaving the door open for several seconds isn't so terrible (however, you shouldn't keep very perishible items, such as eggs, on the door shelves, because they get waved around in the air away from all of the cold food).
An oven works the same way; when you open it, much of the hot air escapes. But if you've let it preheat long enough, the walls of the oven will have been heated through, and the air inside will be able to heat up much faster after you close the door again.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
He got a patent on a new kind of refrigerator .
Deuterium fusion doesn't produce neutrons. Fusion of deuterium and tritium produces prodigious amounts of neutrons, hence the neutron bomb. And any fusion produces lots of gamma rays from the high-energy nuclear reactions.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
.. bear in mind one thing: cost. Obviously any innovative solution that is ecologically sound is good and all, but the worry is that the uptake in 3rd world countries would be slow.
The new fridge might be more reliable and does not pollute, but the old technology has an army of technicians who can service it, and I believe countries like China are still allowed to produce CFC coolants. In fact, when countries agreed to phase out CFC, China's phase-out was based on its production several years in the future, and as a result its production actually jump in the subsequent years as manufacturers took advantage of the loophole.
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Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
So how many grapefruits would it take to fill a refrigerator? Mine's 4.4 cubic feet, and since a grapefruit with a diameter of 3.25 inches has a volume of 0.083 cubic feet, I could probably fit 53 grapefruits in my fridge.
I think that the efficiency of a fridge should be measured in quantities of grapefruits.
Just to clear this up:
Beat frequencies are not 'real' frequencies at all - they don't exist as frequencies. The 'frequency' is simply an amplitude modulation.
In a linear system, if you have two frequencies, they interfere and you get a beat, which is amplitude modulation at the difference in frequencies. The interference does NOT generate a new frequency, and does NOT permit 3-d positioning.
In a nonlinear system (such as air in this case), the nonlinearity DOES cause a new frequency to be created - it distorts the air to make audible sound. This is how the Audio Spotlight works.
But really, I just want the lifty-countertop-fridge for the 'cool' factor...
Wah!
Has anyone tried attaching one of these to a model train yet?
just thought you should know...this is old news just now posted here? ie, five yrs ago, Tim Lucas -no relation, afaik -patented the soundwave compressor ."
Lucas, who started his own company, MacroSonix Corp. in Richmond, Virginia, . . . has licensed it to one company (he won't say which) for refrigerator compressors--the part that compresses and circulates the coolant. The coolant passing through the cavity would be compressed when it encounters the high-pressure portion of the wave. Other applications might include cooling computer chips; "micronizaton," which is the pulverizing of particles down to microscopic size; and filtering out particles from factory exhaust (the sound waves would cause the particles to clump together). .
What kind of wattage would it take to drive 173dB? OK, no gases, but more fossil fuels burned to power this thing, turning out more emmissions contributing the green-house effect. It's kind of like the whole electric car thing...electricity still requires energy from some source, and in most cases it's a fossil-fule burning power plant somewhere.
My uncle co-developed thermo-acoustic refrigerators for the U.S. Navy. He actually helped my build one for my Jr. High science fair project 10 years ago. Its still sitting in my garage.
wish i had more to add, but its nice to see the commercial community is finally catching on to this.
Why, the ones that work for the RIAA!! Boom-ching! Thangyow, thangyow....*sigh*
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
It seems to me that the neatest, cleanest refrigeration technology would have to be based on the Peltier effect. No gasses, no moving parts, no noise. You can even buy Peltier-based refrigerators already, though of course not at mass-production prices.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Yup, you're thinking of real genius.
But no, no oddball tricks with sound occurred in that movie. Definately nothing with ultrasonics.
You're probably thinking of the scene where they hid a small radio in Kurt's mouth, and then speaking to him claiming to be God.
"And Kurt... STOP PLAYING WITH YOURSELF!"
"It really is God..."
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Now I can overclock my loudest pc's!