Building a Vortex Tube

[Music] [Music] so let me ask you a question have you ever heard of a Hills vortex tube' now don't answer that because I wouldn't be able to hear you now this is not a vortex tube' this is just a four inch piece of 1 inch aluminum tubing but this on the other hand might be a vortex tube and we'll get into that just a minute now I'm a little apprehensive about this build nervous anxious maybe because quite frankly I'm trying to build something that I have no intuitive understanding of how it works for all I know I could be building an interocitor what you see here is essentially my best guess based on the very little that I know or I could find I mean it's not that complicated it's only about 6 pieces all of which are pretty straightforward but we'll get back to this for now let's just take a look at what a hill fort X tube is a vortex tube is sort of a t-shaped device that takes a single stream of regular old compressed air and magically separates it into two a hot stream and a coal train let me say that again compressed shop air comes inside and you get hot air on one end and cold air on the other I mean it's almost as unbelievable as the mcdlt box from the 80s with absolutely no moving parts it keeps the cold side cold and the hot side hot now these aren't just a gimmick these are available commercially you can buy a small one for about a hundred bucks apparently they can turn 90 psi shop air from your compressor to 200 degrees C on the hot side and about negative 50 on the cold side terribly inefficient but they'll do it if you're willing to put up the air so we'll get into how a vortex tube does this but as I mentioned I haven't quite gotten my head around it myself so take what I say with grain of salt it was invented in 1931 by a fellow named rank so they called it the pulse tube what a bum rap he got though the more I read about it the more I'm convinced it was a pact with the devil now if you're anything like me you're probably thinking 100 bucks for a tube with no moving parts is a little bit expensive but I think they're making you pay for two things the black magic that's inside and the fact that they probably never break down I mean unless you're pumping like mud through them I assume they'd last forever in this design there are six parts I've got the material rough cut there is still a couple of odds and ends on the back end there but these are the major pieces I'm going to start with the cold end nozzle which seen blue here and along the way we'll chat about how I got here [Music] so the majority these parts are quite simple and to be honest even the complicated ones relatively speaking aren't that difficult either just a lot of concentric turning getting stuff to size so everything goes together I'll be sure to cover some of the subtle details since this part is a little bit wispy I've roughed out the backside I'll size this side and then flip it around again to finish that off [Music] [Music] I usually use wd-40 on aluminum parts but whenever I come across like haunted parts or parts of demonic origin I like to break out the special formulation all the help I can get [Music] the cold side nozzles done the hot side tube fits to that small step there and there's another ring that helps keep this all together all of this lives inside of this pan block here that's the part I make next the combination of these parts creates what's called the swirl chamber let me make this and then we'll talk a little bit more about what I think is going on in the insides [Music] the only really important features of this block are on the inside that'll be all cylindrical lathe work so I figured I would just square it up here in the for job [Music] not perfect but close enough for what I need [Music] you [Music] so this is one of the two pieces that creates the swirl chamber this is sort of the antechamber where the air can come in and you know take off its shoes it's just got a couple of steps there's a hole in the back that just fits the hot side tube and a step and a bore at the front for the cold side tube now the air comes in tangentially here so it induces a swirl in there now for some reason you can't see this part of the video you tube may have blocked it as creating a vortex might not be legal in your country so as it is right now air can't really get into this center tube there's no opening into this horizontal section yet and that's what this collar and series of holes will be for let's make this small ring press it onto the tubing and drill six tangential holes to complete the swirl change [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you these are six evenly spaced holes there are six teeth out one and a half millimeter this fits into the housing pardon me just a minute hello hey is this Adam and nothing that can't wait calm down calm down take a deep breath it's going on I mean the lathe won't run well is it plugged in just go check see if it's plugged in all right y'all good now all right yeah no problem talk to you later so compressed air it comes in two sort of this pre chamber it's already swirling I don't know even how important that is fills up that chamber and the only way out is through these six holes sort of the six Jets this end remember is capped with the cold side nozzle when air comes into those Jets it sort of hits this 10 degree wall and just helps it along of it to make that 90-degree transition to come down the large tube so the air is formed into a vortex and sent that way the left in this case on this end again the end that should get hot there's just a bit of a small valve in principle you adjust the valve until you get the temperature difference that you want to hold the valve in place I made essentially like a valve body / breather cap just a cylindrical cap with I think eight at eight slots around the perimeter this is what slots look like when you don't give us when you don't lock the rotary table valve screws on here and that gives me a way to adjust it in and out and this whole mess fits on the end with three screws I'm not sure yet but I think these screws should be long enough to do the job okay so we said we have a vortex of air coming down this large tube and it runs into a valve seat depending out open or closed that valve is and how much pressure you have coming in you set up sort of a pressure difference in this tube now here's where my speculation begins again take this with a grain of salt because of that pressure balance at some point the air that's coming down the tube insert of that spiral vortex turns in on itself and creates a smaller vortex rotating the same direction but traveling the other way so there's a larger vortex coming down towards this end smaller vortex in the center going out the other end and as it so happens these two vortices create a temperature difference hot air comes out this way from the larger diameter vortex and cold air goes out that end from the smaller diameter vortex now instead of trying to get into some technical mumbo-jumbo here if you're interested in why that happens sort of the phenomenon like the physics of it just go ahead and do what I did and google it I wasn't able to find the clearest answer in the world but there are some interesting white papers out there that talk about it now the hot side tube is actually longer than what I'm showing you here it'll actually be a combination of these two tubes and the valve will be down on this end before I get into that let's talk about how I got here now there doesn't seem to be or I haven't been able to find a lot of information on just how to go about building these things in order to show you how I got to what you're looking at I'm gonna have to get a little sciency on yet and jump into the computer so if you google hills for tex you're likely to get one of three results the first is outside the scope of this the second and majority of information that you find will be plans or recipes for building vortex tubes using standard hardware like plumbing usually PVC pipes washers tape glue that kind of stuff the third thing you'll find is like scientific papers that are a little bit out there I mean interesting reads if you're into that kind of stuff but it's more performance and efficiency not so much dimensions on how to build one that said I ended up working from ranks original patent drawings and some information I found on rex research comm the drawings are interesting it looks like he worked with a few different ways of inducing the vortex but the site includes an interesting drawing from the US Navy of sort of a pipe fitting type assembly with a spiral chamber in the center some more stack ups of you know how you might one of these but what I found most interesting was a chart at the bottom of the page that showed some of Hill shows results in my particular case on with tube number one here and some of the diameters listed more or less I kind of rounded it to get to the material that I had on hand and then modeled that in SolidWorks and geeked out a bit with some flow simulations now I can predict a temperature drop here so I don't know how good of a guess this is I mean I do get a temperature drop but it's a different effect than what I think is happening in the vortex tube I'm seeing more like the expansion of air through a nozzle kind of like what happens when you shoot air out of your air gun in your shop so I started here and I tried to modify the geometry so that the air moving through the Chamber's did so sort of as smoothly as possible and after a lot of screwing around I ended up here that should look familiar I added a couple of features in the cross section here again just sort of help the air get to where I want it reduce some of the recirculation and the chaotic looking flow that happens right as the air transition from the compressed section through the spiral chamber and out the tubes and if you look closely you can see where the vortex inverts on the inside and starts to head towards the cold section again I wasn't able to predict what it would do temperature-wise so I'm just going to have to build this out and see fingers crossed now I'm not sure if this move here is ballsy or stupid but a more smart person than I may have bolted this thing together hello the low-altitude on you got your what and the Vice gamba that what was he even doing out in the shop you know truth be told I've never been that good with these small diameter welds especially on aluminum and of course this happens to be a perfect storm too with a thick heavy aluminum block being welded to a thin walled tube had I broken through on the inside or gotten even a little bit of weld buildup come through I don't think this thing would have developed the vortex that I needed on the inside in order to open the time portal to get me back to my family I suppose there's nothing much left than to try this out to get the whole hot side to Vaughn I made a little plastic sleeve hopefully the pressure doesn't blow this apart I also made a new valve body I wasn't quite happy with how the aluminum one fit and I had the plastic in the lathe to make the adapter for the hot side tube and I thought I'd knock this out same concept set screws and that's the same sort of cone seat in there I'll be honest I'm having some doubt about my material choices I don't know if aluminum is the smartest thing in the world for a device like this I went with aluminum because it's a smoothbore there's no seam on the inside of the tubing I have it in a few different sizes and it's easy to work with I'm wondering if it's thermal conductivity will be a problem given maybe how much air I can push through this with my compressor anyway talk is cheap give it a try alright so let's see if you can pick up on what I'm laying down here daddy oh I've got the tube mounted in my bench vise with a piece of I don't know eighth inch rubber or so just try to keep it insulated no idea if that actually makes any difference but sounds kind of smart I've got three thermocouples tied to the tube I've got a dual channel thermometer brand thermometer my ex Tech multimeter will take a k-type thermocouple I'm using three because I have three if I would have had five I would have probably attached all five now you may note some discrepancy in the numbers this thing is reading about 18 degrees C and that's 4 degrees C higher at 22 though everything here is all the same temperature its temperature at my garage just for a reference it's about 64 degrees Fahrenheit and about 18 degrees C I consider myself a democratic sort of guy so I'm going to go with the majority vote here and call it 18 degrees now I'm not sure how linear that error will be but it's not really a big deal I'm looking more for like the general effect of vortex tube and not trying to split hairs on what the exact temperature is the dual channel thermometer the blue leads are going to be watching the far ends the hot side in the cold side these would have probably been better like in the hot and the cold air streams but that would have been tricky to set up so just on the outside of the aluminum tubing I figure if this runs for a little while it should be pretty close temperature-wise the extech is watching the center in the flow simulation at this length of a tube the vortex inversion happens somewhere in the middle here so I'm going to put on my hearing protection attach the compressed air at that point I think you'll be seeing the temperature readings I've got a camera on the pressure gauge on my hairline and you'll be looking at a thermal image of this whole setup it goes nothing now the thermal image looks a little funky I've had problems with the auto-ranging on this thing like I just can't turn it off it says it's off but it just Auto ranges so it looks like the hot side is already hot and the cold side is already cold but even a tenth of a degree difference kind of throws the whole scale if you can make it out pay attention to the temperature of the plastic parts and maybe the electrical tape if you can see it shiny aluminum also isn't great for infrared thermometers I got to say this is wild the cold side being cold for some reason doesn't impress me as much as the hot side being hot the center here is very hot to the touch the air coming out the back is warm but the center feels hotter to me now if you're watching the pressure gauge you may have noticed that my compressor can't keep up with this vortex tube I may have made this vortex tube a little bit too big the compressor looks like it flatlines around 70 psi the compressor itself is set for 120 psi about 8 bar so I don't know how well you'll be able to see this keep an eye on the temperature there in the background it looks like the very center of the exit on the cold side gets down to about Wow like 1 degree it's very sensitive if I move off of Center even a bit it'll jump up 4 or 5 degrees all right so quick recap vortex tube I mean seems like it's working it's doing something anyway though I'll be honest I have mixed feelings pardon me hello come again oh yeah of course I do Chris right that was everything down there good good what can I do for you oh sure thing just a sec it's about 12 26 so anyway depending on how you interpret those results that I showed you it looks like anything from a 30 degree to a 50 degree temperature difference across the tube I was seeing a hotter temperature in the center here pretty close to 50 degrees C and it was down to about 40 by the time it reached the end I'm going on memory here and in the back the cold side on the outside was 8 or 10 degrees and the center of the stream was down at about 1:00 anyone how do you take those numbers you get sort of a different assessment of the build here but as I was saying I have somewhat mixed feelings about this because I think it really only goes to show that I can sort of follow directions I don't know what knobs to turn here for example if I wanted a hotter hot side or a colder cold side no pun intended there I don't mean the valve at the end I mean the effects of diameters and links you see a lot of information online with tabulated data of different combinations of those which leads me to believe that the physics of what's going on here I don't want to say isn't understood but you know maybe isn't clear-cut in those commercial units I mean what are they doing inside one of those to get them so small this thing's almost three foot long they somehow wrapping that vortex on itself three or four times and just folding it until they get a really small package not a clue be interesting to break one of those things down anyway if anyone's interested I'll put the cad of this build in the description i hope you enjoyed the ride and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 1,127,411

Rating: 4.9410229 out of 5

Keywords: hilsch, Ranque-Hilsch, vortex tube, flir one, building a vortex tube, diy vortex tube, metalworking, lathe, mill, aluminum welding, homeshop machining, hobby metalworking

Id: Hn8hDY4bvpI

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/thunder_cougar]

I didn't expect this guy to be that funny!

[u/goodtimebuddy123]

Insta-subbed. r/skookum would like this guy

[u/[deleted]]

WWJD-40
Fantastic.

[u/Conductor_of_Time]

love it. great video

[u/BoxxZero]

I liked the nod to AvE at 15:10.

"You got your what in the vice?"

[u/SwissMllk]

I use one of these in my lab :) can go from room temp air to two streams one about -20C the other about 50C

[u/[deleted]]

This dude's got jokes, and not it a forced way.

Great channel-find.

[u/yeahfuckyou]

This guy is really great. Never heard of him but I subscribed.

[u/Veyr0n]

Primitive technology dude can make it out of some twigs, twine and a couple leafs