Comment by mirekrusin

7 years ago

Slightly related - I was wondering the other day if it would be practical to have mechanical fridge for a can of a beer where you'd keep pumping out the air, creating lower pressure, cooling down the beer. I was wondering if it would be practical, ie. you could pump the beer to nice chilled temperature without too much sweat?

6 comments

mirekrusin

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n3k5  7 years ago

There's a problem with this proposal: As cooling down the entire fridge via this method is not feasible, you'd have to thermally insulate the can from the outside case of the fridge. As in a normal household fridge, the can would have to give off its heat to the surrounding air inside the cooled chamber. The more of that air you pump out, the more that process slows down.

Instead, you could just take an ordinary mini fridge and replace the electric motor with a hand crank. Or maybe an exercise bike.

It could measure how much work you have put in and show you an estimate of how much longer you need to pedal/crank until you have expended as many calories as the beer contains.

itronitron  7 years ago

The vacuum will serve as an excellent insulator and therefore be unable to cool the beer down. If you're near a cold mountain stream then I suggest placing the can in the stream for a bit until it cools down :)

cpcallen  7 years ago

If you don't want to use electricity, why not just use a gas fridge? No electricity, not moving mechanical parts (except possibly a gas valve, if you want to get all fancy and have it thermostatically controlled) - just a bunch of fluids flowing around a series of interlinked pipes.

The best explanation I've ever read about how they work: https://web.archive.org/web/20051128061124/http://www.cam.ne...

Cthulhu_  7 years ago

Isn't that how refrigerators already work? I mean the stuff that is compressed / evaporated lives in its own subsystem but I don't think there's any reason why that wouldn't work if powered manually.