Food: Temperature
Cooling Rod   (+15, -1)  [vote for, against]
Cryogenic/Peltier Device Cooling Stir Stick

A high-efficiency peltier device or cryogenic cooling "rod" used as a stir stick to rapidly cool hot drinks, etc.
-- bristolz, Oct 21 2000

Making ice cream with liquid nitrogen http://www.polsci.w...cream/Icecream.html
[rmutt, Oct 21 2000]

I think it would be easiest to make such a thing using many small capsules of freezable material with spaces so the drink could flow between them. This could probably cool drinks down very quickly--much more quickly than any reasonably-sized electrical/electronic cooling device (esp. given that such devices have to dump the heat somewhere; part of such a cooling device would have to get quite hot).
-- supercat, Oct 21 2000


True, a Peltier device would have to have heat sinks somewhere and, yes, they would be very hot, indeed. The cryo approach makes more sense, and, using your notion of increased surface area, could perhaps work well. Maybe the device would be charged with liquid nitrogen and, in between uses, would fit in a receptacle that maintained the very cold needed for the liquid nitrogen. The same surface area that would allow rapid beverage cooling would also allow rapid "cooling recharges."
-- bristolz, Oct 22 2000


<annotations missing from [PeterSealy]'s departure>

Interesting. I conceived the idea thinking, primarily, of making scalding drinks cooler (where the icing problem isn't as big an issue) and you think of it for making cool, or room temperature drinks, cold.

Only an experiment will do . . . I will get some liquid nitrogen (I checked, its $17USD + a $50 deposit on the cryo/crucible for 5 litres). I'll use a small glass test tube or something as a stirrer.
-- bristolz, Oct 23 2000


This works faster to cool drinks: Get a surplus roughing pump with a bell jar (perhaps at www.duniway.com). Put your drink into the jar and rough it out. Water at room temperature boils at about 20 mbar and the vapor takes a lot of heat with it. To go from boiling to freeze you have to evaporate about 1/4 of the liquid, and its fast. Great for ice tea.
-- ItsMe, Oct 27 2000


I usually just add one of those plastic ice cube things to the drink. It can't melt water into the drink.
-- Vance, Feb 01 2001


there were two of us at school doing (doing being the operative word) chemistry. your remarks summoned up memories of our lab complete with vodka bottles and coffee made in round bottomed flasks over bunsen burners.
-- po, Dec 15 2001


bristolz--wouldn't the glass test tube holding said liquid nitrogen shatter spectacularly, leaving you with rather cooler coffee-and-glass shards soup? I mean, glass contracts when cold, expands when hot--test tube of liquid nitrogen goes into cup of boiling coffee, inside tries to contract whilst outside is expanding, boom!... or am I missing something?
-- Urania, Dec 15 2001


Yeah, I mispoke/wrote there. I intended this to be an either copper or aluminum rod with myriad heat sinks. Glass would be a shrapnel festival because of the disparity in temperatures and all the other unpleasantries you mention.

Basically, this is just a dream I have had when sitting at the table, nursing a too hot drink. I'm a tepid drink-temp kind of gal. I hate hot.
-- bristolz, Dec 16 2001


I also enjoy my drinks on the brink of warm and hot. If, instead of putting ice into my coffe, I could merely use a stirrer to cool it down, I would definately do so.
-- jimithing, Dec 16 2001


[+] powered by a little solar-electric umbrella.
-- FlyingToaster, Jun 08 2011



random, halfbakery