Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Refrigerated Cooling Suit!

Adam Savage here in my cave with my friend Kipp Bradford how are you sir good and you very good I'm excited because we are about to explore a new Vista of cosplay technology now if you're a regular follower you know that I built myself a spacesuit from alien John Hurt's suit and I wore Don the comic-con floor in San Diego in 2012 2014 in 2014 and I almost got heatstroke wearing basically what was a quilt with armor attached to it so the very following year Chris Hadfield and I walked the floor in a pair of 2001 spacesuits the silver clavia suits into which I'd built an integral cooling system comprised of a bucket of ice water with a recirculating pump and cool shirts and that worked pretty well but Kip among many other things that he has done in his life as an engineer happens to specialize in extremely tiny refrigeration units and we're hoping to build one here in the cave today small enough for me to use in cosplay so get ready we're gonna get cold alright Kip where where do we start there's a lot of little bits and bobs around the shop I'm not even sure I know what this is yeah okay so where do we begin Adam this is that compressor okay oh this is the step that does Boyle's law that yes brings refrigeration and recirculates the this stuff yep our gas that so what is it you compress it when you release it from compression the temperature lowers corrects and you get the refrigeration that's exactly it so the compressor works just like any compressor does there's a piston inside here in this case the piston is a rotary piston so it spins around and as it does so is it a vane pump these are the vane pocket as a vane pump it sucks a gas into this inlet pulls it through the compressor and increases the pressure just like Boyle's law PV equals NRT as you increase that pressure the heat also temperature goes up because we're we're doing mechanical work we put electricity in here that electricity is what's doing that pumping right magnetic field turns the rotor the rotor the vein the vein squeezes the gas we're doing work on the gas right so just like if you're pushing down on a bicycle pump it can get hot it gets hot as you're doing that work so the energy from your arms is transmitted into the pressure of that gas so gas gets hot as we do work to it and it gets compressed we can push that hot gas through another heat exchanger where we blow air over it and take that heat away and when we take the heat heat away we're not just removing heat we're actually compressing the gas as well or we're actually just removing the heat okay so the pressure the pressure from this output side stays constant mm-hmm the temperature is what changes so we take that constant pressure gas we blow the air over it and the reason why the pressure doesn't change is because even if we take all that heat away the gas itself is there's more new gas coming in from the backend so what happens is not that it changes pressure but changes state we go from gas to liquid I see so because we're taking temperature out we can fit more gas in the same volume we can fit more gas in the same volume okay that converts to a liquid and that liquid then goes to the other half of the system where we boil it off and what waving it off is how we get lower the temperature exactly exactly see I don't have a refrigerator works I'm logged that in my time just a little bit it's if you're an engineer you'll notice as a reverse Rankine cycle okay a thermodynamic cycle that's fully closed loop and we do work with a piston or rotor or some kind of machinery that does that compression so we're putting mechanical work into the system and we go from electricity to mechanical work to thermal and then we get rid of the thermal and then we reverse and come back on the cold side boil off turn to a gas and the waste suck gas back in the inlet and it strikes me that this is an especially tiny compressor am i right this is this is this is this one of the tiniest ones this is one of the tiniest compressors and this has a pretty fascinating story at the first Gulf War DARPA put out a call for man portable wearable environmental control system Oh for just the exact thing we're exactly working on and they were did an RFP for tiny compressors yes and two companies one that RFP and one of those companies is Aspen compressor in Marlborough Massachusetts these are made in Kentucky the design of the compressor is a fascinating MIT mechanical engineering PhD of course of course makes these incredibly well balanced super small high-efficiency compact compressors and when you say well-balanced that means that the compressor is efficient because it's not losing any of its energy to vibration so when it's highly balanced you have a smooth system and all the energy is going where you want exactly and it means that if you're if you're wearing it you're not gonna get all that but vibration on tears Oh back it's not gonna make a ton of noise if you ever have your shop compressor turn on in the middle of night and you hear that man oh I have to put a timer on apposite wakes my neighbor's up exactly yes I know a normals live upstairs and sometimes we make their lives worse I don't know they've never complained about the kind of music I love the story okay so the great thing about the DARPA story is that DARPA puts this call out and they get a couple companies that respond to it with these super compacts and compressor technologies and they quickly realize that putting people in spacesuits in the middle of the desert trying to fight a war is a bad idea right because if you have any kind of system failure they're super compromised right away immediately compromised but we get this cool technology out of it and this notion that we can make very compact refrigeration and cooling systems using a portable low voltage DC compressor technology so the original purpose of this being fighting wars with with people in these crazy suits yeah not the smartest idea the result has been I think fairly transformative for a lot of medical applications I use these for a medevac system that could stabilize people's temperatures in medevac helicopters after traumatic injuries on their way to a hospital their way humbly nothing substantive is getting done you can actually bring their doctors down Wow so found some other uses for it made some fun projects and the last system I built was the world's second smallest wearable air conditioner couldn't quite get it to be the smallest just got to be the second smallest and that is currently in a NASA spacesuit simulator that's running around somewhere in the world pretending to be in Mars oh simulation space they're kind of like what the guys are wearing on high seas experiment it was the high so okay Oh fabulous fabulous the the thing we're gonna build is a replica of the high seas basically air conditioner oh my god I'm that's really exciting one I follow the high seas experimentation project for years obviously I revere what those guys have put themselves through and I know the complications of that program but also I love those suits and are great I love reading about how much they love their suits like they fall in love with them okay so what is it for obviously this is the centerpiece of this but how do we start to make our assemblies so this is our centerpiece and there are two other pieces that we need we need a heat exchanger to reject the heat mhm and we need another heat exchanger to absorb heat one of those heat exchangers that's rejecting the heat is going to go from refrigerant which is a gas in this case to air okay and we'll have a fan blowing air over that the second heat exchanger will go from liquid refrigerant as is vaporizing to cool water and that water will then circulate through your cool shirt ah okay right so there'll be a heat exchanger between the right so it would need like a big aluminum plate that's touching the water or something like that something like that will actually use a stainless steel heat exchanger that will go directly from the boiling refrigerant into the water oh into it oh okay and we'll tune the system a little bit so that the water doesn't freeze or you can also use alcohol instead of water and great I haven't money on that even colder ah yes let's do alcohol so let's see I love that idea aye aye sir purple will that work isopropyl works I actually tend to use alcohol with vodka oh yeah great yeah we'll send out for a vodka there's plentiful in the mission to serve and hasten why vodkas great is because it's non-toxic depending on how much you drink since I don't drink that's fine so shall we gather the parts over here let's gather the fire okay all right these are both versions of the same thing these are two versions the same thing and we have a big huge changer and then a smaller key exchanger now the high seats project uses this smaller heat exchanger mhm and the high seas project is not so noise sensitive mm-hmm we can have a little bit more noise generated and it doesn't cause a problem for you though I think we want to go with a bigger heat exchanger okay and a quieter fan so the weight is not much different no there's fairly negligible so sure yeah listen I can accommodate great something this large and then we're also gonna take two other heat exchangers over the table we'll talk about these two as well because they're pretty neat technologies Aspen compressor a US company made in US that has just some really nifty technology and it's hard to get refrigeration components in low quantities most of these companies they don't sell to consumers or individuals now he did not sell the consumers and individuals but if you go to an HVAC store you're not gonna find compressors like this you're not gonna find composed like this right they sell repair parts of those HVAC stores so it's difficult to build the supply chain knowledge to know where to get this stuff these two components are US made this is a heat exchanger from the company called all coil which is in New York Pennsylvania and they make small quantity components great for specialty applications like what we're doing if I was to go to a company say in China or Thailand that makes these for refrigerators or air conditioners the minimum orders gonna be 10,000 units okay answer the phone for you you have to send them a check for 10,000 units and then then they'll talk right all coils great because you can order one oh and to be clear about that structure of this this is just a wide flat tube yeah and through which the material passes and all of this are simply surface area that aluminum meant to shed the heat correct okay that is super cool so this is called a micro channel heat exchanger and it has little micro channels that run along the length of each of these serpentines so there's maybe a hundred channels from top to bottom here and we push gas in this end the gas flows through and because we're pulling so much heat out the gas is a liquid by the time incorrect the other side erects and it's freaking cool that is really really nifty and see all the way through this thing and the larger the heat exchanger for a given amount of gas that we're trying to cool the more surface area we have to call that gas and the less air that we need to blow over the any given surface Scott it so the bulk air flow could be the same but if the bigger fan I make for a given amount of air flow mm-hmm the slower and quieter the fan can get so if I have a really tiny fan and I'm blowing say Exner of CFM x / CFM I have high velocity it was loud right right if I double the size I quadruple that surface area and I can reduce the velocity proportionally right and then also have have quieter fan blades because they're not slicing through the air what is okay so the bigger fan means that it's quieter right okay it also means that we can really crank your system up if you want if you're like I need 800 watts of cooling good things to know about the body as we're standing here right now we're not being very active we're dissipating about 100 watts of heat I'm talking about okay hot light bulb those incandescent light bulbs I guess the kids might not know about those yeah kids yeah the brightest light bulbs 100 watts and it got really hot it got really hot so and that's what we're that's we're putting out kind of the same amount of heat over our entire our entire bodies okay so it's a room temperature this compressor can pull out a couple thousand watts really you crank it up to the max Wow so we're not going to need to do that to keep you cold but if you decide that you want to sprint through comic-con's doesn't just crank the knob up and amazing amazing okay I'm just really psyched about so we've got a confessor we got the heat exchanger that we're gonna get rid of the heat with and we're gonna position this above the compressor okay we have a heat exchanger that we're gonna boil the refrigerant in and I brought two options here and I think we're gonna use the larger option for you okay for several reasons one is this is a called a brace plate heat exchanger and it's stainless steel we put refrigerant in these tubes those tubes and water through those tubes I don't know don't fret but they exchange heat between the two yep freakin cool and we can attach some fittings to this end which less blow water through here and then into your suit Wow MPT it's actually a not it's a British straight pipe thread and the reason why Bruce straight pipe threads are used for these is instead of a taper instead of NPT okay so the taper thread is basically a compression stretching fiction fit so you're literally stretching the metal and tighten that down and that's great except once you've got that preload you have to maintain the preload or else the fitting fails and if your heating and cooling and heating and cooling and doing this ignition putting a lot of movement and yes and it's gonna work itself away it works itself loose and no matter how much the thread lock you put in that eventually will work itself loose so amazing I a made in my book when I was writing the chapter on glue that was one of the hardest parts to write list you've got to think about what the glues gonna go through yes and it's expanding and cooling that means it's gonna work itself away from this or that material if it's not the same material property exactly exactly so we use a straight thread and then the seal is created with a gasket no and that gasket just provides a little bit of preload and if the gasket ever you know maybe ten years from now the rubber hardens you unscrew it another one pop another one okay good to go all right I like this this is great so we hook these components up with some copper tube and there one piece that's missing here we use the compressor to put work into the system right and then we exchange heat with this first heat exchanger yeah now we have to create some way to reduce the pressure so we keep the high pressure side high pressure we have to drop the pressure so that the refrigerant will boil right so we have liquid coming out of the bottom of this heat exchanger we want to blow that liquid off and if you think about water in space the vacuum of space mmm is a loan of pressure that water will just boil off and as it does it will absorb heat right this is the same thing we have a pressure low enough that this substance here which is our refrigerant mm-hmm will boil at the pressures on the low-pressure side of the system and this is a new kind of refrigerant that doesn't add to the ozone hole that's correctly closing like freon used yep okay so this was developed as a replacement to freon in the early 90s and does not destroy the ozone layer and not many people know but among human beings many crimes the ozone hole is about to become an ex human cried like it's closed it's been closing steadily over the past nine years as industry has responded yeah and very occasionally we see blips of rising rising your factories in China I think there's a recent story I heard that and the Amazon and fires also help you out a tribute to the yeah so but we're so how do we create that low pressure system so we tried that low pressure system with the copper tubing equivalent of a resistor it's basically just a flow resistance that you can either use a small nozzle to create that pressure drop yeah so you have a high pressure behind a nozzle you have low pressure in front of the nozzle yeah or we can use a long length of copper tubing so Oh any length of pipe will create resistance and friction as the fluid flows through it and it literally operates exactly like a resistor which does it with electrons but does it with fluid exactly so the whole analogy of electrons to water pressure is actually still works it's still tracks yeah yeah that's great the copper tubing will use the length is going to create the pressure drop and we can change that length that change the pressure drop and that's gonna have an effect on the temperatures that you'll feel great so we're gonna pick something that will give us a little bit below freezing for you at a high speed setting with compressor terrific I'm gonna action getting us some vodka in the shop and I also have a new cool shirt that's actually a full body perfect suit and that's the one I want to try I bought it's actually a 1980s British RAF cool suit for high-altitude fliers but that tubing all feels like it's good it's still like extant and flexible excellent excellent awesome um well you got two that I'm gonna get those broad right right that's excellent and the tubing is perfect it's feel its weight hunger than I thought oh yeah yeah that's great so there's some big ones that run out I haven't pressurized this but my cursory inspection led me to believe that it is in pretty good shape yeah this is expensive and the tubing goes you know it's funny cuz this is the other question I have is there must be optimizations you can make for flat tubing that has a greater skin contact yes and thus a better heat exchange so there there is the funny thing there is a discovery in the early 2000s from some researchers at Stanford Dennis gran being one of them that you get the best heat exchange through the parts of your body that don't have hair on them so your palms soles of your feet your face and you can do more heat exchange through those surfaces than by putting a suit around your whole body oh my god but I think putting the suit on your whole body creates perceived comfort in addition to actual heat exchange and right and that's really important too there couple water pump options oh look at that and this is gotta have a water tank ha ha ha ha that's the oh that's the size that you need it doesn't need to be bigger don't need to be bigger than that so this is the exact size that's in the the high seas suit Wow Wow Wow and this is a different one this is a different one that's a tank and pump built-in ooh that's kind of sexy to know I figured you might appreciate that oh my gosh this is amazing since it as an engineer I appreciate less complexity equals more reliability so I'm inclined to go with the pump reservoir combo what do you think we should try them both out the nice thing is we can build the refrigeration circuit right and have that be a standalone thing and then you can and then play around with the options okay long so great I have the in the CAD right there there's a little pump that is right here mm-hmm this is this amazing British $200 really high-quality high-pressure super quiet water pump and I didn't get a chance to grab it because I was running late to the airport Oh we'll just use the one that I shipped this is great this looks like a kind of almost like a bait pen like yeah we need some LEDs in there yes okay so what is the first step for assembly it's really the first step for assembly is we want to set the components up so we've got two heat exchangers that we're gonna need to basically position and then brace some copper tubing into okay and if we go with the drawings that I've made I think the ideal setup is going to be something along the lines of this okay so do you need me to make a bracket so we can make a bracket or I think the the process that usually is to do this is positioning the parts and then figuring out what the copper tubing run should be and we've got a the high seas model that we're starting with but we're gonna use a different heat exchange I use with high seas so the high seas system used this heat exchanger which I haven't talked about yet okay I talked about that for a second okay what's different between this heat exchanger in this one it's a m-- thing two different channels for different liquid right that are kept opposed to each other yes yep and this heat exchanger is a stack of steel plates with some ridges on them and the steel plates are pressed together put in a furnace and then the furnace raises like surface mount electronics almost exactly okay and the that stack you can see these these kind of channel formed channels and the the way this bottom plate is a pan all the rest of these plates have that same pan feature okay so you stock all the highs up mm-hmm and the pans alternate refrigerant water refrigerant water for the water the brazing process is is you could do this with a torch yeah but doing it in a furnace gives you good uniformity this heat exchanger is also steel plates but these are flat steel plates with and they didn't have the channel have been etched so those plates are thin enough that we can use actually processes and this is then vacuum furnace bonded and the bonding process involves heating up you put it a dissimilar metal bracket around it and that similar bracket when you heat this the steel expands more than the bracket does so as the steel is expanding the bracket creates a compressive force that diffusion bonds the layers of steel together good god with with Wow so we we can etch micro channels in using photo lithography processes that are super precise we get a much smaller more compact unit that isn't doesn't quite have the capacity of this but you can see is that's an impressive the small thing heat exchanger is something that can cool down a human body that is is rated at 800 watts of cooling some believe this is rated about 1.2 kilowatts of cooling and and this is so efficient because you can get high amounts of precision in the etching process and that's a lot of flow through it even though it's really tight a lot of float a lot of surface area for exchange right right right the surface area is everything surface area is everything and the difference in price of these is also pretty funny this is maybe 40 $50 get them made in a factory overseas this is about $400 so 10x difference in costs okay I see super super cool technology from one-off projects those those aren't crazy price points but for any business venture that is variant difference you really have to have a need for using something that size we're going to use this mostly because we can put threaded fittings on right and make it really easy to interface directly with your suit and pump and when you're holding this up here and this goes with this I would love to know if these pipes can be there while I have a lot of room for to put in let's say fake place for a space suit this space will be a premium so I'd love to keep that dimension this X dimension as narrow as possible assume we can cut these a little bit tighter we're not gonna cut them we're gonna bend though okay great so I've got some metal benders too and some flames tools who we need those and Bend you know the copper tubes around so it'll create a nice flat profile okay we'll keep everything in a line and that way we can get our refrigerant out to our heat exchanger so we go out of the compressor and we go up to the top to of the heat exchanger that way notice the gas works its way back and forth and gets to condense down to liquid the liquid drops to the bottom and then the bottom comes out and then goes to the bottom of this heat exchanger okay where we boil up so we end up with a gas at the top okay and then alright so there's a direction to this there is a direction okay yeah and then to mount this to this I'm assuming we need a little bit of some bracket äj-- is that correct right it's will be good we can zip tie up but brackets are gonna be better okay ultimately I have endless numbers of spacers and our little nuts and bolts and even all thread should be needed after we get everything positioned the way we want we'll mount it on a fixture great 80/20 a piece of wood just so that we can braise it yeah once it's braised it'll hold the stuff together then we can make sure to measure and create a bracket that holds everything in to your suit fabulous don't put any strain on the join them to copper joint because aluminum copper joints they're delicate they're very delicate oh that's lovely yeah it's it's soft and I can guarantee that I'm not overloading the joint right right right notice that it's it stays straight as it comes out of here right I got most of the bend and that's important because we didn't stress exactly at all exactly because if we lose these connections brazing copper to aluminum is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do I want to think about it don't even want to think about it succeeded better people than me it conveys this John all right I'm gonna up a tube that's gonna come out of the compressor and it's gonna need to get into here right so if I flipped like that and then it comes in the top I can come out and beyond up in the top okay that seems great so that makes that easy okay and then the tube that comes out of the bottom is going to go into our expansion valve so we're gonna have something like this come in here we'll have a coil of some of this and like I said the length will determine the temperature that determines to the temperature are the length of this tube which gives us the pressure drop okay the speed of the compressor which tells us how much gas we're moving how much mass of past a certain point right and then the amount of refrigerant that we have in the system so we want to balance those three things and we've got some tools to do that okay how do we braise this to this does that get braised or is it a pressure fence that's gonna be braised we're gonna braise all this stuff together so do we need to machine some specific copper little couplers yeah you know we could machine them or we could just take a pair of pliers and crimp the soft copper tubing down around this oh really yeah and that's do and then you just fill some amazing material you know that I do it just want you to see the cool that day that I did invest in full retail rack or both of these but I'm all about the simplest possible fusion doesn't know that I have this is good to know one of the funny things about this tubing you saw how easy it was for me to bend yeah by hand yes this there are two styles of copper tubing for refrigeration there's drawn tube and then there's an eel tube right the drawn tube is pretty rigid right because it's been mechanically drawn yeah it means it's work hard work hardened yeah the anneal tube after you draw it even baked so and the steel is release all of those tensions of the crystals from inside yes and it's super bendable and it's really fun to work with so you don't need College to talk engineering we should not mention how many degrees I have I have zero three I an honorary degrees which are worth just as they're worth nothing actually did believe it or not I I think that the out of school education for me has been so much more informed so my background is I have a mechanical engineering right right right this is all thermodynamics and what's really really fun about this is yeah I'll make fun of my education it's a fantastic education and I it is certainly extremely well but when I took thermodynamics in college I couldn't tell you what all these parts were how they worked what they did I can just tell you the math behind what what they're supposed to be doing right right and the gap between that theoretical knowledge and then understanding not just like why do we have a capillary tube right but what these parts are how you put them together that gap was pretty big in closing that gap not only did I take that theoretical knowledge and then the practical knowledge and rigid but it gave me a very deep appreciation for how these systems work and how you optimize them ago I behave and I think that's something special that we really need to get more engineers learning the practical sides they see that and get more of the technicians understanding a little bit more of the science on Mythbusters we frequently had trouble when we call up one of the world's experts in the field we were trying to explicate because they'd be so much of an expert at the one thing they knew but they couldn't discuss with us how it crossed correlated to this other part of the store right and nothing exists within its own frame it's all reaching out to deal with other frames and so we found the polymaths the people with more wide ranges of experience much more able to talk to speak to and adjust between multiple fields it's it's amazing the contexts that connect something like this and how much knowledge of this context really really helps put those pieces together like okay I see a compressor I know what it does and then I know the physics of what's happening so I understand what goes on inside the exchanger and what changes when I speed the compressor up or slow it down or change the diameter of the capillary tube or change refrigerants from say our 134a which is freon it's not only every change affects multiple other systems yeah and so it's not just a simple of move this and this happens it's all these cascading if I can change the chemistry of the refrigerants and that changes everything else in this is Wow and understanding what those effects are or change the speed of the fan and what's gonna happen how much liquid refrigerant do I have left over when the speed of the fan goes up amazing all those things are connected well I figure it doesn't matter how far it goes in no yeah okay so then the bend comes about here yeah you could start bending there and because we're just gonna want to clear the fan and I'll stay in line with the IC I kind of want to be in line with that valve at the bottom yep oh it's this is the best stuff to work with so then once we have that and I think I can actually come in even tighter yep and then this comes around here and comes that way wow it looks like I actually cut it I think you have excited it's just about the perfect size Wow because if you didn't we could fudge it a little bit because we're gonna do the same thing we're gonna insert this into the mouth of the compressor since that's a quarter-inch don't pull that out yet okay so the reason why this has the plugs in it is that the compressor has a oil that's a Palio ether oil mm-hmm and that oil absorbs moisture and as it absorbs moisture it creates an acid and that acid over time will eat away at the insides of the components so we don't want to so I'm gonna cut this down by half inch cuz we don't need more than that just a little bit far oh yeah yeah yeah and how much copper to to steal brazing experience you have hmm some oh I'll do the first one I'll tell you know the stuff that I use for everything is stay bright silver solder so we I'll grab stay still 56 over 60 still 56 which is a high silver content phosphorous bronze brazing rod the high silver is we always use it in special effects cuz it's strong it's really strong and it's just about the only really sensible way to create the copper to stainless steel bond and I uh I was doing it to UM what did i buy oh those stainless steel chrome doesn't actually desert brass and then chromed balls and I'm able to to braise brass to them nice right through the chrome yeah that's really nice that is pretty awesome so we'll do that to copper to stainless here and so we've got that connection I think that's gonna look nice yeah we the bottom of this is going to come out and we're going to go into the capillary tube and will basically spiral this down and come into the bottom the heat exchanger here so we're gonna take a little quarter inch pipe and make a straight stub to come out and we'll crimp that stub will crimp this into here all right will crimp is stub into here so we're kind of what we're doing right now is setting up all the brazing we're going to exactly if we don't do a great job cleaning the copper tubing those little copper filings will flow through the system and end up in the compressor we don't want that to happen so we use this filter dryer which has a little filter on the inside and I've have these made at a factory custom-built for me so that it's got the right diameter to slip right on there and for our capillary tube to slip right in there if we didn't have that then we'd have to create fittings that make all these things fit together so this will make it a lot easier perfect and that's really cleaned out with a three sixteenths reamer excellent so this atom is I brought a couple filter drives cuz I didn't remember which size we're going to need but this has one the perfect fitting I'll just slip right on there and we're gonna slip that here same thing now we're gonna have a maybe 30 to 32 inches of tube coiled that will go from this point here down to this point here okay and the really nice thing about that bender that you have is you can do clean hundred and eighty degrees yes that's nice yeah okay so then so then we're just gonna do 180 full Bend yep from from right about here yep I'm no copper dust in there so perfect look at that right there okay so then that goes there yep so that's that's it those are the P really yeah oh wait but then there's this it goes to do yeah so the rule like said we'll have this this one's gonna go here yep and then the coil is gonna come out see how this is so nicely sized if it really really sexy the only thing that we're gonna do that's gonna be tricky is and by tricky I mean slick and also difficult great is we need a fitting to be able to add refrigerant and a fitting so that we can measure the performance of the system okay so does that mean we need a little T of copper you know we could use it T of copper but what I've found is that we can cheat a little bit and we can drill a hole into the side of the copper th and we're gonna braise this in okay what that ends up looking like so this joint mm-hmm is kind of uh oh that's crazy yeah didn't do that I did this way closer to the copper yeah we're not gonna do it that close because I think I probably got lucky there there's no reason to expect accuracy from drilled holes on them Fe so having Center drilled that we have a really clean hole now that's lovely get a nice fit there oh yeah oh good one thing it's really important to always remember to take your Schrader cores out before brazing yes because the o-rings always that makes things bad the decision as always we can fuck the flux this we're not really if we're doing copper to copper and it's fresh clean copper like this flux is optional oh I didn't realize that got a little bit of an orange tail I want to try to get that to be a little bit okay that's pretty good yeah it's a nice little it's that will keep that joint clean it's really important to flex this joint because we've got the dissimilar metals coming together and the flux is what's going to allow the brazing material to flow in between the metals effectively so we want to get good coverage on the surfaces and it's going to make all the difference so that should fill that material up clean that up to make sure we get some good flux coverage again and then we're gonna heat this sucker up secret here is we want to heat up the copper first and the stainless steel last how's it going you here just for that part so this is the copper to stainless brazing and this is a tough thing yes this is the tough thing so we hit up the copper because the copper conducts heat a lot battery well and it's just gonna pull the heat I give away and I'm just gonna keep stroking the copper whistle until it flows and then I grinding again I just get the stainless a little bit make sure we get good coverage dude and we got a really nice clean joint that's awesome you can see how uniform that so you're actually feeding nitrogen in here while you're doing it yep any we shut that down now you can examine cuz I actually uh fills us with nitrogenous abstentions everything air Oh nitrogen that often just sits there very cool so that's one joint and the only thing I'm gonna do is it's right here now we've made that joint I want to make sure that we flow through here yeah because if I screwed up that's never good so we should get the puffs there we go Oh cuz you can see it step out there yeah if I fed too much rolling the target I'll clog it up I've done that once yeah I've got about a hundred fifty systems and it's like let's never do that again and so now you're gonna do the same thing again with this one yeah alright it's always terrifying brazing stuff there other stuff that's been braised yeah yep fortunately oh I see you needed the goggles that day that shielding yeah I mean this is it's it's really not that hot of a flame but ya know it's good practice because the oxy rig will make you blind for a day yeah pay attention all right that looks good so should be really uniform some of that is definitely flux it's always good to clean the flux off and make sure that that's do you need a certificate to do that you need the hydro oxygen yeah okay I think I've got some yeah so that's that's the stainless to copper and we can take advantage of these fittings once they're braised in to fill the system with nitrogen amazing so we're gonna have this sitting here we'll pop that into the and it's slightly long in case yeah well I instead of cutting out I just bend it up a little bit cuz it's it's so much easier right right right once we're yeah you should roll it yeah we can roll it we can we can work with this straight piece here mm-hmm so the we're at that point where we can look at the last couple steps I always do the compressor last partly because the compressor has the oil in it but also because we can get everything else set up and if anything has to get tweaked we can tweak it and then the compress will be the last joint to make so there the next joint we can do if you want rest that tube on top of the compressor you know the next joint will do is the coming out of here and then going down into here let me just dunk it in a glass of water right exactly is it hygroscopic we'll pull water back into the holes yeah okay so we want to get it up quickly so we'll hook it up while we're still pretty warm and I'm doing all the brazing with the high silver content material just because we can it'll look pretty when there's just a little in the back yeah see so I'm just gonna make sure it's got coverage good it's like that puppy on here oh and then we want to measure out I could do these separately but we'll do at the same time okay guys stay selves why the heck not Oh use that as the SAS nice how can I do this part that looks really fun there's this kind of thing thank you for letting me play one part for inches off the end we can split an unsupported supersoft that's perfect oh whoops oh yeah sorry I should probably close up first there you go excellent so we're gonna stick this in here mm-hmm get a little scotch brite and then once we get everything set up the last thing we'll do is unspool it insert it in there and close everything up I guess and just a straight up tube filled with desiccant right yep and there's a little mechanical filter strainer filter on it as well so you're not doing anything but just improving the desk it by getting it hot right right nice wedding give that good wedding make sure there's lots of extra in there so I try to avoid getting you that's all right I can take it all right and then one of the things again I'll do is make sure that I've got good flow and I didn't plug in a hole so I'm gonna hold my finger over that you know and then ya feel that oh yeah oh nice yeah careful about breathing in that nitrogen yeah are you kidding just an asphyxiant right that's exactly exactly it so we're pretty good shape the final three joints to do I think we'll do the compressor now and then the last one will do is this okay so so now we actually want to pop out the plugs and the faster we do yeah this one the better works three perfect now we hit it okay just a little bit cleaning there then this one will take a little sneak it around like that but more maybe we'll stick it underneath like that and that goes that'll go there so you want to put such bright that these are the other two tricky joints because heating up a painted compressor right with oil in it yes it's always it's fun and ok that's the steepest that one's going yeah so again we could just do regular because it's so clean because it's clean and copper to copper but it I think you'll enjoy the shiny silver finish along the braze joints so now there's a fun bit where we can put pressure through here we should get something out of here and they'll put my finger on here yeah and then that will pressure right here yep see here that the little click in the compressor I'm hearing something leaking somewhere yeah that leak is right here oh that's that yep that's put my finger here oh this tells me we have a complete circuit wait so yeah that's awesome we've pressurized we've got pressure all the way back through our evaporator the cold side yeah we've got pressure through the compressor we're actually pushing nitrogen through the compressor through this heat exchanger through the filter dryer and then out the capillary tube which we will then hook up to here this is the last braze connection we have to make and then you have a fully completed circuit we'll put that in a bucket of water yep will pressurize with nitrogen make sure there are no bubbles okay and then we know I've we have a sealed system we can pull vacuum on it so incredible and then this is where the water circulates yeah this is the business end that's the business end so electricity in here cold out of here at this point everything is ready to go so all we got to do is bend this down and start it in here and use the pipe cleaner also to make you stiff being out any authorization since we've done all the brazing under dry nitrogen yeah it keeps the dryness make sure that we don't get any water in the system any water in the oil the nitrogen part is nice because we can get it instantly it prevents an oxidation inside during the braze it prevents the heat oxidation from causing like this kind of flake can you see on the outside oh that would end up that comes amazing the flow right that ends up inside right and that that material the oxidized copper just clogs the oil and over time it might take ten years it might take one year but over time if you got enough of it right it caused the system to fail unroll it like this and then do a kind of a twisty twist yeah and ice have it come down like that exactly and then it just would sit like that to me is kind of nice perfect that seems like cheating it is so I have got a little bit of motion so I know that I didn't crimp down on the tube itself so I just closed this off and if you look at the end you know there's enough of a gap there all I got to do is fill that with Ray's materials and then we're good this guy this is pretty easy joint because there's not a lot of copper here just on the end just like that nice amazing and fast that is done we have a fully built system now should be all done with the brazing part and we're ready leak test oh it's time to leak test it's time to leak to us okay so now you need a bucket no we need a bucket of water all right kid this is what happens when you ask a science communicator for a bucket that should yeah that should hold the whole thing I think we're gonna have a little displacement I may need to add a little on top I don't want to get any water in the Schrader's because that water can right then potentially get entrained in the system so I close these would have a nice gasket on the inside oh nice and take use this one to fill so we take our nitrogen i nitrogen attached that we've got a Schrader's in now and we'll do a pressurized bubble leak test okay where oh why see will pressurize it and put it in to see if it's coming out anywhere so we're now at 200 psi of nitrogen may I not yell we do that it's got excited you good to get excited she's very important we're gonna disconnect this line oh so now it's still under pressure so still under pressure we have because of the Schrader exactly and this is why having the Schrader's in number one I know that had a straighter and now because I pressurized it let me do this and if that's coming out of that right now just coming out of there yeah hmm interesting I don't think that's a leak in the heat exchanger a leak in the heat exchanger yeah that's a pinhole heat exchanger leak well all of my brains don't sit good do you want to try and braise that one should try to braise that shut okay that looks good damn all right okay let's cross their fingers and hope that we do it's these are lost free fittings or Loas fittings amazing I was amazed when I found out you could do that by using hydraulic quick connects with pneumatic systems yeah yeah yep all right I just put it up to about 300 psi so okay really will we should see something immediately if I did a good job yes I've never done that before first time ever that Wow dude that was an awesome effect now I just want to make sure we get all of this underwater let me put this cap on first oh yeah there you go sorry thank you nope no worries thank you perfect and I see no leaks coming from anywhere yeah amazing dude that was that's you know nuts our day could have gone any which way in the making or we're done by the end of the day that it's awesome so do we leave that in there for a while yeah we're good we okay have a lottery system test done now does leak test done you have a hermetically sealed system as we know oh my god and the next two steps we'll pull out a vacuum to remove all the nitrogen okay and we will oh and then we fill it with the thing we fill it with Bertrand we've got that so we'll pull vacuum to remove the night remove the nitrogen we will fill it with a little refrigerant hook up the electronics fill it with more refrigerant walls running and then you'll have a perfect system amazing inside my gauge set right now I've got a a very high vacuum that I've pulled over the weekend and we've hooked up a can of automotive our 1:34 which is the refrigerant we're gonna use for this and you have to be certified yes plumb this is X so I have certified a universal EPA HVAC certification under normal circumstances we would use in any real HVAC work a 30 kilogram okay big bar a 15 kilogram tank right a big bottle in the case of a system like this we're really only gonna put about 30 grams 40 grams of refrigerant in okay so it doesn't make sense to have 15 kilograms when we only need 30 grams as an alternative this little tank of refrigerant here for automotive purposes is 340 grams so we'll end up using 20% of this bottle or instead of like 2% of a really big bottle that's awesome we've had to make a little juryrigg connector together automotive bottle and the automotive can tap through to our standard refrigeration fill line and we braised that in the other day the other time so I've purged any air out of my refrigeration line and ready to fill this so we always fill the suction side which means adding refrigerant to the blue line okay and to do that I'm gonna make sure I always start off making sure my valves are closed this one I can have open because we're gonna add refrigerant here we've zeroed out our scale I want to know how many grams we put in okay it's helpful to understand how the system is behaving and at this point is pretty simple we open this up we know what's up and we're gonna squeeze the trigger to add more bread so we've now added a starting refrigeration charge of let's see how many grams we've gots three whole grams of refrigerant so we've got about three grams in a system the pressure has gone from high vacuum up to 55 psi and this is when we can start the compressor since we no longer have the system under vacuum we have some minimal refrigerant charge in the system we can spin the compressor and it can do some work once we get the compressor moving we'll continue to add refrigerant until we see a couple different values up here on here so I'm gonna grab two other clamps so we can watch the temperatures so this first clamp I'm putting on the suction side of the compressor okay and what this is going to tell me this is really fundamental measurement we're gonna be boiling refrigerant off here and the refrigerants gonna come through this heat exchanger and as it's absorbing heat we can measure the temperature when it gets to here okay we're also measuring the pressure at this point so at a given pressure we're gonna have a given boiling points of given temperature for water water boils at 100 degrees the gas that's the steam that's generated can be hotter than 100 degrees the water itself right can never be hotter than 100 degrees Celsius 212 Fahrenheit at sea level but we can change the pressure like if you go to Colorado you're a higher elevation which means you can have a different boiling point in different temperature so we can modulate those boiling points oh I changing the amount of refrigerant in the system and changing the speed of the compressor fascinating so look at them that can change overall how fast it can go through cooling cycles and how much it can cool and also how efficient the system is I never realized it was an adjustable set of values with it yes I just thought you put it under pressure and boiled it off and in that change you got cold but that's but your with part of it different pressures yield right right right oh my god so we can adjust those pressures and temperatures and we're gonna adjust them to make the system really efficient and also give you the right amount of cooling amazing so right because there's an optimal relationship between the values exactly that's exactly the case so okay gonna go ahead and make sure this is all ready and if you feel this actually no and you probably get a little cold that should be cold mmm-hmm these cans are not the best these fittings leak a little bit so I see I want to make sure that we've keep our pressure up here and now we can basically spend the compressor now okay this control board is ready to go but I'm gonna take a little shortcut here which is I don't know why I write to the compressor we can wire the right right to the compressor I'm hoping that my software is still running on our little Arduino board but we're gonna plug in 24 volts hook up Larry turn this off rounds no go ahead I don't mind plugging things in while they're on it's all low voltage yeah nothing to be afraid of here all right so because that second we'll see if that turns on and if it doesn't then we should wire directly in whoa there it goes so that was a great check system yeah that it was going through to make sure it was finding everything it wanted to find exactly and now the compressors running I'm gonna keep adding refrigerant okay and I'm gonna watch these temperatures so this is the temperature that we're boiling at right so I want the warm side of this to be warm enough that we can reject heat and the cold side cold enough that we can absorb you tonight this is getting warmer excellent yeah it's definitely getting colder right down at the bottom here where the oh yeah boiling is taking place that's gonna be the coldest spot other thing we can do is if you have a jumper I think we're gonna jump the 5 volts directly to the speed setting so that I don't have to plug my Arduino in all right sneak that in here there we go 77 a fan on here we can start to get rid of some of that heat okay oh yeah this is getting nice and hot on the hot side okay so now you need a third um power supply before when we weren't taking heat away the cold side was cold but it was not as cold as is now now we're getting rid of that heat the cold side is extremely cold to the point where we've got a layer of ice forming on all these - once we hook add them up we will get a load so we'll start taking Adams heat away into this system and then when we crank it back up to full speed Adam will get cold quickly outlet into the top one because we want to go okay flow we want to have right cold refrigerant going up and we want to have the water going down that way you're gonna get the most effective cooling fastest and then it comes out of me into into yes into there yeah it's pumping out a lot isn't it oh that seems like right we should let's crank it up we're going it that slow speed here so you crank that fan and we're gonna go yeah I was thinking it didn't feel like it was getting any colder but now it is I mean I'm definitely feeling cooling all over I loved it this 1975 Royal Air Force cool suits still totally functional they're fast we can go before you feel in it like the moment you did that I'm feeling a difference yeah that seems to be one of the limiting factors and how cold we can get yep yeah I can feel the conspirators we're circulating so we definitely need a more powerful pump yeah dude check me out I'm getting cold this is the most elaborate way to get cold in most the United States right now if you just walk outside there's also helping it sink in how incredible it is that NASA built us all into their space students write something fully everything here is in a self-contained spacesuit along with oxygen and other stuff going on and other telemetry oh yeah again I always understood how the system worked but seeing its level of complexity is kind of amazing in the vacuum of space dealing with temperature is really tricky because you can't conduct temperature away by by having air that's cold or hot right right you've got solar radiation that's bringing a lot of energy onto people and then you're giving away photons out in the space so there's these trade-offs of of heat flux this that NASA had a system that kept kept astronauts cool by actually boiling off a gas and dissipate a liquid in space and basically just vaporizing it and as you do that you can you can have a lot of phase changes happening here right it's changed absorbs energy absorbs heat and tah-dah you're managing temperature now I feel like I'm standing outside oh yeah great day I'm starting to get real cold it is actually I think we're hitting some good at some point you can look at the thermal image oh yeah that's awesome yeah you can see the lines on your body where the FLIR is picking up all the cold tubes that's spectacular I think that's what I would call a successful test of the mini refrigerator that Kipp designed and we built here because it has me freezing and I want to say cut so we can wrap it I can get on some normal speed clothes so cut really noticeable it's moving I mean it's moving to heat yeah man and if we crank up the the pump yeah you're gonna that's pretty awesome

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 1,328,187

Rating: 4.9280782 out of 5

Keywords: tested, testedcom, adam savage, one day build, one day builds, adam savage's one day builds, cool suit, thermal suit, cooling suit, thermal, active cool suit, cosplay, costume, radiator, adam savage one day builds, adam savage tested, tested adam savage one day build, one day builds tested, space suit, thermal camera, HI-SEAS, flir, nation of makers, maker faire, cosplay cooling vest, cosplay cooling fan, cosplay cooling system, refrigeration, refrigeration tech

Id: z_Ti4GP0ntE

Length: 67min 8sec (4028 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LukeHoersten]

This is a great one. The guest is super articulate and knowledgeable. I learned a ton.

[u/mortalcosta]

Maybe someone can answer this question. They are using Nitrogen for the flame as well as testing the system. As a welder, we use Argon or some other inert gas like xenon to make sure that no oxygen but Nitrogen is not an inert gas. What is the benefits of using Nitrogen or why is that the preferred gas?

[u/electricspacemen]

Where can I find a parts list for this?