Anti-Frostidigitation: Heatpipe Gloves

Posted by michael on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:08AM from the windchill-of-minus-20 dept.

Hettinga writes "A little casemod couture this morning, courtesy of Hongbin Ma, a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri. He has developed heatpipe-driven gloves which pump therms from your toasty upper arm down to those aforementioned frosty digits. 'Each glove contains five small heat pipes, one for each finger, that are about 14 inches long and 1 mm x 2 mm in the cross section. Each pipe consists of three sections: an evaporating section, which is attached to the upper arm area; an adiabatic section, which is between the finger area and the arm area; and the condensing section, which is attached to the finger area.' Coming soon to a half-pipe near you..."

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Re:Furthermore ... by mangu · 2004-01-22 09:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

These gloves work by shifting some of the heat from more core parts of your body to your extremities.

Alcohol has the same effect. It dilates the blood vessels in your skin, making you feel warmer at the cost of increased heat loss. That, coupled with a general loss of sensibility and reasoning, causes many deaths in places where the temperature falls below freezing.