I’ve learned more about refrigeration systems from this guy than I thought I would ever be interested in I think it’s because it’s a crossover between the diy chemistry that’s been created from scratch and then with some home made janky engineering made on the cheap at home is just brilliant. The only one way you learn something sometimes is just go do it yourself
As not only an air conditioning technician, but an avid experimenter, watching you answer so many "what ifs" as you engineer your way through DIYing something this complicated is fascinating in the best possible way. I even learned something today, which was your explanation of why impure refrigerant (something us A/C guys refer to as "non-condensibles") raises the pressure on the high side. That being the law of partial pressures.
Industrial refrigeration expert here. Very nicely done. My personal preference for calculating refrigeration cycles is Danfoss Coolselector. It makes quick work of determining discharge temperatures and other refrigeration properties and is quick to populator PT refrigeration cycle diagrams. At first I was worried that you were picking up heat from your aftercooler instead of rejecting heat but then I ran some numbers and it looks like your discharge temp from your compressor should be around 100°C. Those little scroll compressors don't like much above those temps and mineral oil can start carburizing so I would be mindful of that. Try and get your high stage evaporation temp lower to help with this as ethylene has a ton of heat when it is compressed, unlike propane which stays pretty cool.
I started looking into ethylene as a refrigerant since I never came across it before in the field and it's labeled as R1150 but odd thing is Danfoss won't give you low temperature evaporation pressures for R1150. I think it's maxed out somewhere around -23°C so it's all experimenting after that. Regardless he'll be evaporating below atmospheric. I thought too he might've been gaining heat from his aftercooler. I advised him to put a fan on it to help condense. It's a nifty project he got going on. On my end I probably would've tried something like 404A on the first stage and one of those butane refrigerants or even R437A (R12 replacement) on the 2nd to try out.
@@derrickenbuenosaires Are you sure coolselector won't do ethyleneat these target temps? I just checked on coolselector 2 and it seems to calculate it just fine.
@@scottcarr1563 Sorry I was using the Reftools app by Danfoss. I went into the application again and found that I can now go down to -100 C with ethynol lol might've been a glitch or something. Evap pressure should be around 4 below atmospheric if he can successfully reach -100 C.
I love that we get to see what is being talked about using "practical effects" (actually doing it) rather than us just having to use our imaginations. There is a lot of important how-to knowledge that doesn't come from just having to imagine things.
In the winter of 1994 I was a freshman volunteer crawling through access tunnels stringing fiber for the new "World Wide Web" on campus. Hyperspace, you are the living embodiment of the future I was dreaming about. Well done sir.
As a industrial refrigeration tech I have to say you never cease to amaze with what you are doing. I’ve forwarded it to several co workers who watch it now.
So another approach to distilling the Ethylene could be to go down to your local weld shop and have them fill up a foam cooler with liquid nitrogen for a few bucks, then use that to chill down your mix and let all the other gasses out. Yes, I can see the irony here.
Would lowering the cat heat not do the same thing at room temps. Ether boils at 35c and unless I am mistaken it could be recycled into the ethanol stream
Love it that you got yourself a copper brazed plate heat exchanger. I figured those would be pretty expensive for the budget you're building this, and I figured you'd be quite stuck after the heat exchanger issue of last video. Super cool! Edit: okay so after completing your video, you could pressurrise a balloon with the Hydrogen Ethylene mixture. Since H2 is really difficult to keep contained, it'll naturally diffuse the membrane. The Ethylene will also, but much slower since they're bigger molecules. You'd have to have some form of purity test to find out your purity of your mixture, but that doesn't sound undoable. Just very low yield. Another method is to try to bind the H2 to something like Iron Oxide and then filter out the water like you did before. Not sure if this is at all possible, or practical. Nonetheless, some cool chemical reactions with to bind hydrogen can be found here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
that could work, but since he already got the high pressure condenser he could try draining the liquid ethylene straight down into another smaller vessel with a valve and disconnected, so the liquid displaces all the gas up to the valve. After disconnecting you should be left with a nice pure sample of high pressure ethylene. I didn't pay enough attention to be sure if this is a bomb, but I figure you will figure it out... before it blows up of course 😅
Note that ethylene should also get out of the balloon fast-ish since it can fairly well dissolve into the rubber. Maybe try butane and see how fast that escapes as a comparison to hydrogen and air.
@@leocurious9919 : Hmm, use several diameters of rubber hose running through each other, all in turn running through a lower-leakage pipe, with lowest pressure on the outside and highest inside, and you could produce a continuous-flow fractional distiller system.
@@absalomdraconis As long as hydrogen is getting through the hoses at a significantly different speed: Yes, I guess so? Seems super sketchy tho. Note that it is not a fractional distillation, nothing is liquid. It is mostly diffusion.
The importance of a home scientist should never be lost to time, nor government. Most profound discoveries were made in a garage, basement or an attic. Fantastic work!
Wow! We tore out out cascade cooling systems as they weren‘t very reliable. One can drive compressors near their limit/just outside it by replacing the valve plates (higher compression, higher wear) and with R404 you‘d reach similar temperature differentials. Or go cheap and use a Mayekawa screw compressor 😅 -100C with their Pascal Air. I salute your efforts, this is so good because I had forgotten why you want to reach these low temperatures!
About leaks: Leak testers for hydrocarbons like propane could work for you too. They have a flexible sniffer that can reach the spots where the leaks usually occur (the least accessible point of failure).
Was literally rewatching this series going back to the pulse tube cooler eps last night. Glad to see you’re still getting closer to the goal. I’ll be anxiously awaiting the next installment.
Amazing technochemisty brought to the masses that could be utilized by the citizen scientist to unlock all kinds of high tech DIY. Great content and entertaining narration - thanks so much!
Knowing enough to generate your own refrigerant and build a 2 stage cryocooler but not having pipe dope on hand is both magnificent and terrifying. Love the videos though.
You mentioned that Ethane was more complicated to produce, but I don't think it is. Look at Kolbe electrolysis, Scrap Science did a video on it recently. If you do the electrolysis, run the generated gas through a gas washing bottle (you can make one from a jam jar) with Sodium hydroxide solution in to remove the Carbon Dioxide. Add an indicator to the hydroxide to see when it's getting depleted, or you could calculate the required amount and use an excess or chain a few of them together to ensure complete removal. The collected gas should be Ethane and water vapour. The electrolysis should give quite pure gas, but will take ages to collect any decent volume. To reduce the water vapour content before collecting you could add a drying tube made from silica gel or another method. If you require a gas with no CO2, then you could run the dried gas through a tube filled with dried solid Sodium hydroxide.
Have to admit during your first video in this series, I remember thinking by myself this shouldn't be too hard I could probably do this myself. Seeing your struggles and doing everything "the hard way", I'm reconsidering those thoughts! Great videos!
Years ago I used to fill balloons with HHO and blow them up, if the balloon stayed pressurised for too long though all the hydrogen would escape as the molecule was so small, the balloon was essentially acting as a molecular sieve. Filling a large balloon up with your contaminated ethylene+ hydrogen may filter out the hydrogen component, probably not air though... Just a thought ;) love your work man! Been watching every video with massive interest as I love refrigeration!
Nice thought. Working with ~200L gas in ballons at 1atm is not totally impossible, but a garage full of ballons leaking hydrogen sounds like a REALLY fun insurance case :D
The best option for your second stage compressor would be a semi-hermetic compressor. Great flow rates and you don't have to worry as much about the compressor oil getting trapped in the low side and the windings won't be running in a vacuum.
I am following along in this project... I have been playing with refrigeration since late January. Today I am using my CNC to put grooves on both sides of a copper plate. This will fit between two water sprays... trying to make q cheap heat exchanger... Even these little scraps of copper are going to be stuffed back inside the grooves. Much fun watching your approach :)
I am intrigued by your experiences with a DIY cascade refrigeration system. I took the 'easy' way out and found a commercial used/surplus one on Ebay that produces -110c temps. In the event it ever fails I will use the knowledge I have picked up watching your videos.
This is great stuff man, I've really been enjoying the last few months and even with a little physics and a decent HVAC background I find myself rewinding, pausing and visualizing, but thank you for not dumbing it down.
Ethane might be complicated to produce, but you can just buy it. Heck, at XCOR we used it as a rocket fuel for more than ten years and simply called up our welding supplier whenever we needed more. Amusingly, because it has modest pressure at ambient temperatures, ethane was supplied in the oldest bottles we'd ever seen, ones that had been derated due to their age. The record was a bottle that had hydrotest dates stretching back to 1915, almost a century old at the time.
3:33 pro tip: use a sponge, dish soap and a bit of water. Use the wet, soapy sponge on the soldered joint and leave it alone while the system is under pressure for 2-3 days. If, after 3 days, no bubbles formed, the system won’t leak anytime soon.
I’m retired now but I worked on cascade systems and I charged my 1st circuit 12 subcooling. With -10 to 12 superheat. At 100%. My second stage I charged to 12 subcooling and and 12-13 superheat but you can go as low as 10 due to low oil return from evap. Note you must lower oil viscosity on second circuit. Note that high head with low suction may be txv issue or restriction on a cap tube. Hope this helps always pull a vacuum lol
This is great stuff! Whenever something doesn't pan out I like to see that as gaining wisdom. Sure, it can be quite frustrating to put a ton of work into something and it doesn't work, but then eventually you get to the bottom of it and it does work. When that happens, it may be even more rewarding than if it had worked out great the first time around. At least that is what I keep telling myself. Thank you for inspiring and informative content!
Really enjoying this series It's been a ride, for sure!!!! Thanks for playing out what went wrong - so often we see content creators just telling success ... We learn from trial and error, and experimentation! Keep up the awesome sauce, can't wait to see the next!!
Wow, what an incredible journey! I’m beyond impressed with the depth of your research and analysis of what’s actually happening in the system. - Not to mention the level of focus and sheer energy you’ve brought to the project. Two thumbs way up, I can’t wait for the next chapter! (I’ve been watching all of your vids from start to finish the moment I see them in my feed 👍👍😁
From someone who has built and operated cryo hydrogen systems, craftsmanship counts. When you make liquid air are you prepared for the fun that will bring to even what you touched your connection points with. Where is the JT valve? Use the pressure drop that provides to force the phase change at the HE. Matching the flow needed and where your system deviates from everything from surface area of everything. Compressor flow, pipe, where is your jacketed piping? Losing before measurement? Joules Thompson valve and that flow pulling it through the latent heat zone. Vacuum, gravity, and even a simulation run fifty ways on the computer are your friend. Good call on the toxicity of the flourene solder. In industry you wouldn’t believe the risks others love to put the guy commissioning.
Two things One your AC guy could never pull the wool over your eyes Two it looks like you have about $4,000 worth of copper. That was more or less just an observation Awesome as always
You might be able to get purer ethylene by refluxing ethanol with phosphoric acid - the only product is ethylene. I don't think it's quite as continuous as your alumina catalyst process though, which could therefore be faffier
Yes , one would measure the inlet and the outlet. Really the outlet reflects the numbers that correspond to what is actually happening in the condensor.
Thanks for these. I've been wanting to do the opposite. I want to move summer heat from my off grid cabin into a storage mass buried next to it for winter usage. Seeing these real life examples of pv=nrt. I could probably use these standard components for the initial stages, but for the hotter stages I'll have to figure out a heavier medium. The length of thinking a lazy person will go to in order to avoid chopping wood might be unmeasurable.
Good work! Have you seen Ben Krasnow's (Applied Science) video on that cascade system he refurbished? Another good channel doing cascade refrigeration is M4J5TER. He figured out you can use ordinary silicon diodes to measure cryogenic temps.
wow your learning and building your Projects fast! keep going. Try to find some old condensing units for walk in boxes 404a or r22, the compressors have more power and have an easier time reaching 400psi headpressure while running like 10psi suction, also they come with a condenser with fan and Receiver sometimes even with liquid seperator etc.
The Insulation of cold parts should block water vapour from the ambient air. You can achieve that by using aluminum tape. It will improve insulation significantly. Good luck!
On the second stage why not raise your oil sump above the process tube on your compressor then it returns to the crank case as it is still on the suction side. Then a heat tape on the cap tube that the oil drains through. An intermittent switch activated by temperature. Then the heat introduction would be minimal. Just a thought from an old HVAC Tech/ Contractor. That style of evaporator is considered a shell evaporator.
Don’t be afraid of the suction running in a vacuum! In the old days even household refrigerator/freezers ran in a vacuum! Early cascade systems used R12 for the first stage and R502 for the second stage! Note that in those systems we skip the oil separator by using pentane to keep the mineral oil flowing. Propane is less miscible in POE and therefore slightly more efficient but needs velocity to return the oil. Probably not an issue in this small close coupled system. Note that there are cascade systems that use a single compressor with two different refrigerants called an “auto cascade”!
The diagram w pressure meters at 17:20 is nice. There was an earlier diagram of the same that did not have numbers on the meter faces, and which had a tick mark st the 6 o'clock position, and that earlier one was confusing.
This is very neat I'm learning alot from it. I'm wanting to try and use some of this to make a 12v system for my truck. Aka a 12v ac unit for lunch time. Having a hard time finding a proper pump for this
one thing that I caught myself thinking now, you have to include a safety valve in the ethylene condenser. As shown in the video, if the first stage stops and there is no cooling in the ethylene condenser, there will be nothing to prevent the pressure from continuing to rise until one of the components fails. that would cause an explosion
Use loctite high strength for thread sealing. For sealing flares and sealed joints use Nylog or similar HVAC sealant. Also I've read that more than 12ft of cap tube doesn't really affect the flow much. That was my experience also when I put together two 10 ft pieces I felt it was basically no different than with just one.
you could use one of them dehumidifers with the quick restart feature (witch uses an electric valve to equalize the pressures balancing the pressures so the compressor can restart after a power outage. some refrigerators use the same idea to defrost. also you could get a refrigerant recovery machine witch is oiless or even an oxygen compressor used for medical use as a refrigeration compressor.
Try draining the liquid ethylene straight down into another smaller vessel with a valve and disconnected, so the liquid displaces all the gas up to the valve. After disconnecting you should be left with a nice pure sample of high pressure ethylene. I didn't pay enough attention to be sure if this is a bomb, but I figure you will figure it out... before it blows up of course 😅
hi, beautiful work! Congratulations on your effort. let me try to help with some tips. To reduce the by-products in ethylene generation you must preheat the ethanol vapor to the reaction temperature at the reactor inlet, so you avoid temperature gradients inside the reactor, this makes the reaction more selective. The easiest way for you would be to add a tube-to-tube heat exchanger in a cross-flow configuration. Circulate the reactor outlet in one tube and the steam inlet in the other. with this you will have the inlet gas at a temperature close to ideal.
To separate ethylene from hydrogen you have two options, one is to use a molecular sieve (zeolite), the other is to place the reservoir you made in a dry ice bath. as the temperature of dry ice is lower than that of liquid ethylene, you will condense the ethylene and be able to purge the hydrogen at ambient pressure (although a little pressure in the reservoir can help the process by increasing the ethylene condensation temperature, since they are very close). I keep watching your videos, count on me to help you. congratulations
reviewing what I wrote has an error. you will need to pressurize the reservoir to about 100psi to have an ethylene condensation temperature of around -60C. So to separate the hydrogen you will have to purge it little by little as soon as the temperature stabilizes
also consider passing the final product through a molecular sieve as part of the hydrogen can be dissolved in the ethylene and this will cause you problems. as the size of these molecules are very different any zeolite will help you and you just need to put it in a container and pass the gas through it
great video, i know it take allot of work and investment from you to produce this videos, and to share it with us. thank you for your work and sharing 👍✅
If you needed to condense the second stage intercooler (Condenser) then you could try and put a fan on the tube and fin heat exchangeer to help that process. The dishcharge should be at a higher temperature than ambient and cooler at the outlet of that heat exchanger. Maybe putting probes on the inlet and outlet can help you determine if there is some type of heat exchange going on or if you're gaining heat. I was thinking maybe you needed to add more charge but your pressures went way high. Regardless I'm not sure what pressures ethanol runs on the high side. Impurities like you said can be a problem. Maybe the cap tube was too long causing those high side pressures but you should've reached some type of heat exchange at the 2nd evaporator once proper condensing pressure was reached. EDIT: CRAP ! I looked up ethylene PT chart and found that that refrigerant runs super high pressures ! I was expecting something like R12 or R134A system pressures lol Whatever your evaporating temperature is on the first stage, you want to be 15°C or 30° F above that. I think you said -32° C. So condensing temp should be around -17°C roughly. This condensing temperature for R1150 equates to 380 psig condensing pressure. Seems like you were right there on the second try. I never touched a R1150 system so new to me but as long as your condensing temperature (2nd stage) is higher than your evaporating temperature of the first stage then it should theoretically be doing some heat exchange. -80° C would be 34 psig on the suction side of second stage or 16 psig for that delta of 10 degrees between evap temp and cut-out temp of -80° C.
I'm happy you get to work out the details. It makes my job easier. Lol.. I'm Thinking you could bend the 1mm tube to collapse it in a few spots instead of using 50 feet?
I think a large portion of this is down to the fact your gas based burner likely overheated the lower portion of the catalyst. There is a decent chance the temp readings on the lower part of the tube are much higher than the lower portion. I think it might be worth trying lower temps. Since if you favour the output of ether and ethylene rather than ethylene and hydrogen. Unless I am mistaken you can simply recycle the ether into the ethanol as ether boils at 34.6C where as does so at -103c. It also might not hurt to purify the ethanol to avoid introducing any water into the system, which you can do via something like an off the shelf air still. This and it might be worth using nichrome wire along with insulation kaowool.
"I never thought I'd see a refrigeration cascade, let alone create one!"
We tried to warn them!
But the Administrator assured us it was the purest sample yet...
We boosted the anti-mass spectrometer 105%. Bit of a gamble, but we need the extra resolution.
"Im no sure sure i want to get to the surface, what if they find what we were cooling down here"
I predicted all of this, you know...
I’ve learned more about refrigeration systems from this guy than I thought I would ever be interested in I think it’s because it’s a crossover between the diy chemistry that’s been created from scratch and then with some home made janky engineering made on the cheap at home is just brilliant. The only one way you learn something sometimes is just go do it yourself
I hated thermodynamics (the subject) but this is a lot of fun!
These series are giving me newfound appreciation for HVAC. It's not just fancy plumbing anymore.
As not only an air conditioning technician, but an avid experimenter, watching you answer so many "what ifs" as you engineer your way through DIYing something this complicated is fascinating in the best possible way. I even learned something today, which was your explanation of why impure refrigerant (something us A/C guys refer to as "non-condensibles") raises the pressure on the high side. That being the law of partial pressures.
Industrial refrigeration expert here. Very nicely done. My personal preference for calculating refrigeration cycles is Danfoss Coolselector. It makes quick work of determining discharge temperatures and other refrigeration properties and is quick to populator PT refrigeration cycle diagrams. At first I was worried that you were picking up heat from your aftercooler instead of rejecting heat but then I ran some numbers and it looks like your discharge temp from your compressor should be around 100°C. Those little scroll compressors don't like much above those temps and mineral oil can start carburizing so I would be mindful of that. Try and get your high stage evaporation temp lower to help with this as ethylene has a ton of heat when it is compressed, unlike propane which stays pretty cool.
you know what else is pretty cool? deez nuts
I started looking into ethylene as a refrigerant since I never came across it before in the field and it's labeled as R1150 but odd thing is Danfoss won't give you low temperature evaporation pressures for R1150. I think it's maxed out somewhere around -23°C so it's all experimenting after that. Regardless he'll be evaporating below atmospheric. I thought too he might've been gaining heat from his aftercooler. I advised him to put a fan on it to help condense. It's a nifty project he got going on. On my end I probably would've tried something like 404A on the first stage and one of those butane refrigerants or even R437A (R12 replacement) on the 2nd to try out.
@@derrickenbuenosaires you can condense these nuts in your mouth
@@derrickenbuenosaires Are you sure coolselector won't do ethyleneat these target temps? I just checked on coolselector 2 and it seems to calculate it just fine.
@@scottcarr1563 Sorry I was using the Reftools app by Danfoss. I went into the application again and found that I can now go down to -100 C with ethynol lol might've been a glitch or something. Evap pressure should be around 4 below atmospheric if he can successfully reach -100 C.
I love that we get to see what is being talked about using "practical effects" (actually doing it) rather than us just having to use our imaginations.
There is a lot of important how-to knowledge that doesn't come from just having to imagine things.
In the winter of 1994 I was a freshman volunteer crawling through access tunnels stringing fiber for the new "World Wide Web" on campus. Hyperspace, you are the living embodiment of the future I was dreaming about. Well done sir.
As a industrial refrigeration tech I have to say you never cease to amaze with what you are doing. I’ve forwarded it to several co workers who watch it now.
So another approach to distilling the Ethylene could be to go down to your local weld shop and have them fill up a foam cooler with liquid nitrogen for a few bucks, then use that to chill down your mix and let all the other gasses out. Yes, I can see the irony here.
Important note! Most places won't let you put LN2 dewars in any kind of enclosed space. You'll need a trailer or cargo rack to transport it.
@@defenestrated23not even in the bed of a truck?
@@defenestrated23 Ah, interesting and good note for future reference, thanks!
At least he would only have to do that once, so not too bad.
Would lowering the cat heat not do the same thing at room temps. Ether boils at 35c and unless I am mistaken it could be recycled into the ethanol stream
Since Tom shit the bed with the Cubane series this has become my new "must watch immediately" youtube binge. Love the vids my man
I hate Sundays, but you’re reversing the trend for me with these videos. Thank you!
What kind of a monster hates Sundays?
@@Assault_Butter_Knife the kind who hates rushing to get my shit in order before having to go back to work on Monday.
Love it that you got yourself a copper brazed plate heat exchanger. I figured those would be pretty expensive for the budget you're building this, and I figured you'd be quite stuck after the heat exchanger issue of last video. Super cool!
Edit: okay so after completing your video, you could pressurrise a balloon with the Hydrogen Ethylene mixture. Since H2 is really difficult to keep contained, it'll naturally diffuse the membrane. The Ethylene will also, but much slower since they're bigger molecules. You'd have to have some form of purity test to find out your purity of your mixture, but that doesn't sound undoable. Just very low yield.
Another method is to try to bind the H2 to something like Iron Oxide and then filter out the water like you did before. Not sure if this is at all possible, or practical. Nonetheless, some cool chemical reactions with to bind hydrogen can be found here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
that could work, but since he already got the high pressure condenser he could try draining the liquid ethylene straight down into another smaller vessel with a valve and disconnected, so the liquid displaces all the gas up to the valve.
After disconnecting you should be left with a nice pure sample of high pressure ethylene.
I didn't pay enough attention to be sure if this is a bomb, but I figure you will figure it out... before it blows up of course 😅
You can pick up a brazed plate heat exchanger for under $40 on that giant Chinese site, the one named after the Arab character and his 40 thieves.
Note that ethylene should also get out of the balloon fast-ish since it can fairly well dissolve into the rubber. Maybe try butane and see how fast that escapes as a comparison to hydrogen and air.
@@leocurious9919 : Hmm, use several diameters of rubber hose running through each other, all in turn running through a lower-leakage pipe, with lowest pressure on the outside and highest inside, and you could produce a continuous-flow fractional distiller system.
@@absalomdraconis As long as hydrogen is getting through the hoses at a significantly different speed: Yes, I guess so? Seems super sketchy tho. Note that it is not a fractional distillation, nothing is liquid. It is mostly diffusion.
The importance of a home scientist should never be lost to time, nor government. Most profound discoveries were made in a garage, basement or an attic. Fantastic work!
Wow!
We tore out out cascade cooling systems as they weren‘t
very reliable.
One can drive compressors near their limit/just outside it
by replacing the valve plates (higher compression, higher
wear) and with R404 you‘d reach similar temperature
differentials.
Or go cheap and use a Mayekawa screw compressor 😅
-100C with their Pascal Air.
I salute your efforts, this is so good because I had forgotten
why you want to reach these low temperatures!
About leaks:
Leak testers for hydrocarbons like propane could work for you too.
They have a flexible sniffer that can reach the spots where the leaks usually occur (the least accessible point of failure).
My favorite series on TH-cam right now. I catch myself every few days checking your channel for the next video 😂
I get enjoyment out of visualizing the refrigeration cycle, it started when I was a a boy and continues to this day. I have always wanted to try this.
Was literally rewatching this series going back to the pulse tube cooler eps last night. Glad to see you’re still getting closer to the goal. I’ll be anxiously awaiting the next installment.
YES! I waited for this video and i swear i had rewatched all of the videos in this series at least three times, such a good quality series
I’ve learnt I’m really interested in refrigerated systems. Who knew
I remember when this was a shake weight ductaped to a bong. Now look at you. Got a control panel and toggle switches.
Amazing technochemisty brought to the masses that could be utilized by the citizen scientist to unlock all kinds of high tech DIY. Great content and entertaining narration - thanks so much!
This is a master's level physics project.
Knowing enough to generate your own refrigerant and build a 2 stage cryocooler but not having pipe dope on hand is both magnificent and terrifying. Love the videos though.
I watched the video as soon as it came out, and I'm coming back here daily waiting for the update, amazing project, and amazing channel.
You mentioned that Ethane was more complicated to produce, but I don't think it is. Look at Kolbe electrolysis, Scrap Science did a video on it recently.
If you do the electrolysis, run the generated gas through a gas washing bottle (you can make one from a jam jar) with Sodium hydroxide solution in to remove the Carbon Dioxide. Add an indicator to the hydroxide to see when it's getting depleted, or you could calculate the required amount and use an excess or chain a few of them together to ensure complete removal. The collected gas should be Ethane and water vapour.
The electrolysis should give quite pure gas, but will take ages to collect any decent volume. To reduce the water vapour content before collecting you could add a drying tube made from silica gel or another method. If you require a gas with no CO2, then you could run the dried gas through a tube filled with dried solid Sodium hydroxide.
Sorry about the last minute failure. This channel is amazing. I REALLY want to do my own version of these projects and it's an amazing resource.
Have to admit during your first video in this series, I remember thinking by myself this shouldn't be too hard I could probably do this myself. Seeing your struggles and doing everything "the hard way", I'm reconsidering those thoughts! Great videos!
Was suprised to learn that the capillary length influences the pressure, very cool.
Years ago I used to fill balloons with HHO and blow them up, if the balloon stayed pressurised for too long though all the hydrogen would escape as the molecule was so small, the balloon was essentially acting as a molecular sieve. Filling a large balloon up with your contaminated ethylene+ hydrogen may filter out the hydrogen component, probably not air though... Just a thought ;) love your work man! Been watching every video with massive interest as I love refrigeration!
Nice thought. Working with ~200L gas in ballons at 1atm is not totally impossible, but a garage full of ballons leaking hydrogen sounds like a REALLY fun insurance case :D
@@vikenemesh haha true, guess that will motivate him to ensure it's relatively pure in the first place ;)
I'm glad you shared your "lessons learned" about your progress. I didn't think the hydrogen would be saturated in the Ethylene
This channel and the person behind it are legendary.
The best option for your second stage compressor would be a semi-hermetic compressor. Great flow rates and you don't have to worry as much about the compressor oil getting trapped in the low side and the windings won't be running in a vacuum.
I am following along in this project... I have been playing with refrigeration since late January.
Today I am using my CNC to put grooves on both sides of a copper plate. This will fit between two water sprays... trying to make q cheap heat exchanger...
Even these little scraps of copper are going to be stuffed back inside the grooves.
Much fun watching your approach :)
ive been checking everyday for the last week for this video
I am loving this series. It's like all of the good stuff and none of the mind numbing stuff from my thermodynamics classes at uni.
These episodes are always a treat. Looking forward to the next one.
I cannot wait for the next part!
Great video. Love the mistakes with the dead pan humor. The mistakes are the real value to the experiance.
Seriously, never have I understood so little yet been so entertained
Love the boot- strap approach.
Thank you for sharing.
I am intrigued by your experiences with a DIY cascade refrigeration system. I took the 'easy' way out and found a commercial used/surplus one on Ebay that produces -110c temps. In the event it ever fails I will use the knowledge I have picked up watching your videos.
This is great stuff man, I've really been enjoying the last few months and even with a little physics and a decent HVAC background I find myself rewinding, pausing and visualizing, but thank you for not dumbing it down.
Refreshed my TH-cam Feed at JUST THE RIGHT TIME!
Chilling story. You're a cool guy.
Ethane might be complicated to produce, but you can just buy it. Heck, at XCOR we used it as a rocket fuel for more than ten years and simply called up our welding supplier whenever we needed more.
Amusingly, because it has modest pressure at ambient temperatures, ethane was supplied in the oldest bottles we'd ever seen, ones that had been derated due to their age. The record was a bottle that had hydrotest dates stretching back to 1915, almost a century old at the time.
This is sick! Excited to see the final product
3:33 pro tip: use a sponge, dish soap and a bit of water. Use the wet, soapy sponge on the soldered joint and leave it alone while the system is under pressure for 2-3 days. If, after 3 days, no bubbles formed, the system won’t leak anytime soon.
I have no idea what this guy is saying but it's super interesting. I need this video dumbed down even more 😅
I’m retired now but I worked on cascade systems and I charged my 1st circuit 12 subcooling. With -10 to 12 superheat. At 100%. My second stage I charged to 12 subcooling and and 12-13 superheat but you can go as low as 10 due to low oil return from evap. Note you must lower oil viscosity on second circuit.
Note that high head with low suction may be txv issue or restriction on a cap tube.
Hope this helps
always pull a vacuum lol
This is good stuff. I work everyday with cascade systems and compound cooling and I find this very entertaining
You’re so close man! Can’t wait to see your cryo-cooler
Every thing going above my head but still watching your videos (refrigeration series) 😅
this entire project is super interesting to follow. Best of luck with your ethylene problems.
This is great stuff! Whenever something doesn't pan out I like to see that as gaining wisdom. Sure, it can be quite frustrating to put a ton of work into something and it doesn't work, but then eventually you get to the bottom of it and it does work. When that happens, it may be even more rewarding than if it had worked out great the first time around. At least that is what I keep telling myself. Thank you for inspiring and informative content!
Seems like some LN2 would make purifying your Ethylene easier.
This will be great. That Ethylene video was BANANAS. 🍌🍌🍌
Discovered your refrigeration series and may have ended up watching every video you have posted.. love what you are doing keep it up!
Really enjoying this series
It's been a ride, for sure!!!!
Thanks for playing out what went wrong - so often we see content creators just telling success ... We learn from trial and error, and experimentation!
Keep up the awesome sauce, can't wait to see the next!!
Fascinating, this project of yours! Also, a load of good information is flushed on the viewers - many pauses needed 🙂
Wow, what an incredible journey! I’m beyond impressed with the depth of your research and analysis of what’s actually happening in the system. - Not to mention the level of focus and sheer energy you’ve brought to the project. Two thumbs way up, I can’t wait for the next chapter! (I’ve been watching all of your vids from start to finish the moment I see them in my feed 👍👍😁
been waiting for this video so long that i forget about this
From someone who has built and operated cryo hydrogen systems, craftsmanship counts.
When you make liquid air are you prepared for the fun that will bring to even what you touched your connection points with.
Where is the JT valve? Use the pressure drop that provides to force the phase change at the HE.
Matching the flow needed and where your system deviates from everything from surface area of everything. Compressor flow, pipe, where is your jacketed piping? Losing before measurement?
Joules Thompson valve and that flow pulling it through the latent heat zone.
Vacuum, gravity, and even a simulation run fifty ways on the computer are your friend.
Good call on the toxicity of the flourene solder.
In industry you wouldn’t believe the risks others love to put the guy commissioning.
You can buy silver solder on a roll, with a silver solder Flux, and it's strong enough that I use it on custom length bandsaw blades
I love what youre doing man, every time you post I stop what I'm doing to watch! Keep up the good work
I love your videos on this subject, and I love that you keep on trying to find a way.
Two things
One your AC guy could never pull the wool over your eyes
Two it looks like you have about $4,000 worth of copper. That was more or less just an observation
Awesome as always
Nice mention on Hackaday…👏👏👏
Been waiting for this to drop!!!
Now this is an artist makin dope art here!
You might be able to get purer ethylene by refluxing ethanol with phosphoric acid - the only product is ethylene. I don't think it's quite as continuous as your alumina catalyst process though, which could therefore be faffier
Yes , one would measure the inlet and the outlet. Really the outlet reflects the numbers that correspond to what is actually happening in the condensor.
Thanks for these.
I've been wanting to do the opposite.
I want to move summer heat from my off grid cabin into a storage mass buried next to it for winter usage. Seeing these real life examples of pv=nrt.
I could probably use these standard components for the initial stages, but for the hotter stages I'll have to figure out a heavier medium.
The length of thinking a lazy person will go to in order to avoid chopping wood might be unmeasurable.
Good work! Have you seen Ben Krasnow's (Applied Science) video on that cascade system he refurbished? Another good channel doing cascade refrigeration is M4J5TER. He figured out you can use ordinary silicon diodes to measure cryogenic temps.
the notification of the new video actually made my day better
This is INTENSE! You are a friggin GENIUS!
Not a fail, many lessons learned. Keep'it coming it is so interesting to follow this project!
wow your learning and building your Projects fast! keep going. Try to find some old condensing units for walk in boxes 404a or r22, the compressors have more power and have an easier time reaching 400psi headpressure while running like 10psi suction, also they come with a condenser with fan and Receiver sometimes even with liquid seperator etc.
The Insulation of cold parts should block water vapour from the ambient air. You can achieve that by using aluminum tape. It will improve insulation significantly. Good luck!
I was thinking about how to more evenly heat the catalyst chamber last episode. It will be interesting to see what you come up with
I can't wait to see you get this working properly. I want to see it run as planned.
You got MUCH further in this effort than I ever would have, congratulations on the learning fail. ; )
I wanna learn more about this cooling technology.
Thanks for sharing
On the second stage why not raise your oil sump above the process tube on your compressor then it returns to the crank case as it is still on the suction side.
Then a heat tape on the cap tube that the oil drains through. An intermittent switch activated by temperature.
Then the heat introduction would be minimal.
Just a thought from an old HVAC Tech/ Contractor.
That style of evaporator is considered a shell evaporator.
Don’t be afraid of the suction running in a vacuum! In the old days even household refrigerator/freezers ran in a vacuum! Early cascade systems used R12 for the first stage and R502 for the second stage! Note that in those systems we skip the oil separator by using pentane to keep the mineral oil flowing. Propane is less miscible in POE and therefore slightly more efficient but needs velocity to return the oil. Probably not an issue in this small close coupled system. Note that there are cascade systems that use a single compressor with two different refrigerants called an “auto cascade”!
This chanel is gold!
Keep up the good work man !
The diagram w pressure meters at 17:20 is nice.
There was an earlier diagram of the same that did not have numbers on the meter faces, and which had a tick mark st the 6 o'clock position, and that earlier one was confusing.
This is very neat I'm learning alot from it. I'm wanting to try and use some of this to make a 12v system for my truck. Aka a 12v ac unit for lunch time. Having a hard time finding a proper pump for this
Incredible project! Clicked in a microsecond. Keep going! 🎉
one thing that I caught myself thinking now, you have to include a safety valve in the ethylene condenser. As shown in the video, if the first stage stops and there is no cooling in the ethylene condenser, there will be nothing to prevent the pressure from continuing to rise until one of the components fails. that would cause an explosion
Use loctite high strength for thread sealing. For sealing flares and sealed joints use Nylog or similar HVAC sealant. Also I've read that more than 12ft of cap tube doesn't really affect the flow much. That was my experience also when I put together two 10 ft pieces I felt it was basically no different than with just one.
you could use one of them dehumidifers with the quick restart feature (witch uses an electric valve to equalize the pressures balancing the pressures so the compressor can restart after a power outage.
some refrigerators use the same idea to defrost.
also you could get a refrigerant recovery machine witch is oiless or even an oxygen compressor used for medical use as a refrigeration compressor.
Try draining the liquid ethylene straight down into another smaller vessel with a valve and disconnected, so the liquid displaces all the gas up to the valve.
After disconnecting you should be left with a nice pure sample of high pressure ethylene.
I didn't pay enough attention to be sure if this is a bomb, but I figure you will figure it out... before it blows up of course 😅
This is one of my favorite ongoing animes
hi, beautiful work! Congratulations on your effort. let me try to help with some tips. To reduce the by-products in ethylene generation you must preheat the ethanol vapor to the reaction temperature at the reactor inlet, so you avoid temperature gradients inside the reactor, this makes the reaction more selective. The easiest way for you would be to add a tube-to-tube heat exchanger in a cross-flow configuration. Circulate the reactor outlet in one tube and the steam inlet in the other. with this you will have the inlet gas at a temperature close to ideal.
To separate ethylene from hydrogen you have two options, one is to use a molecular sieve (zeolite), the other is to place the reservoir you made in a dry ice bath. as the temperature of dry ice is lower than that of liquid ethylene, you will condense the ethylene and be able to purge the hydrogen at ambient pressure (although a little pressure in the reservoir can help the process by increasing the ethylene condensation temperature, since they are very close). I keep watching your videos, count on me to help you. congratulations
As for your cascading system I see room for some improvements. Let me know if you're interested.
Thanks for the pointers. I was actually planning to purify via dry ice for the next part of this video
reviewing what I wrote has an error. you will need to pressurize the reservoir to about 100psi to have an ethylene condensation temperature of around -60C. So to separate the hydrogen you will have to purge it little by little as soon as the temperature stabilizes
also consider passing the final product through a molecular sieve as part of the hydrogen can be dissolved in the ethylene and this will cause you problems.
as the size of these molecules are very different any zeolite will help you and you just need to put it in a container and pass the gas through it
great video,
i know it take allot of work and investment from you to produce this videos, and to share it with us.
thank you for your work and sharing 👍✅
Great video,
I'll be looking forward to see the following one!
i love this series, cant wait for the next episode
dude I love your videos. thanks so much for producing these videos. I feel like I learn so much everytime.
SO FREAKING COOL!! GL ON PART II
If you needed to condense the second stage intercooler (Condenser) then you could try and put a fan on the tube and fin heat exchangeer to help that process.
The dishcharge should be at a higher temperature than ambient and cooler at the outlet of that heat exchanger.
Maybe putting probes on the inlet and outlet can help you determine if there is some type of heat exchange going on or if you're gaining heat.
I was thinking maybe you needed to add more charge but your pressures went way high. Regardless I'm not sure what pressures ethanol runs on the high side.
Impurities like you said can be a problem. Maybe the cap tube was too long causing those high side pressures but you should've reached some type of heat exchange at the 2nd evaporator once proper condensing pressure was reached.
EDIT: CRAP ! I looked up ethylene PT chart and found that that refrigerant runs super high pressures ! I was expecting something like R12 or R134A system pressures lol
Whatever your evaporating temperature is on the first stage, you want to be 15°C or 30° F above that. I think you said -32° C. So condensing temp should be around -17°C roughly.
This condensing temperature for R1150 equates to 380 psig condensing pressure. Seems like you were right there on the second try. I never touched a R1150 system so new to me but as long as your condensing temperature (2nd stage) is higher than your evaporating temperature of the first stage then it should theoretically be doing some heat exchange.
-80° C would be 34 psig on the suction side of second stage or 16 psig for that delta of 10 degrees between evap temp and cut-out temp of -80° C.
I'm happy you get to work out the details. It makes my job easier. Lol.. I'm Thinking you could bend the 1mm tube to collapse it in a few spots instead of using 50 feet?
I think a large portion of this is down to the fact your gas based burner likely overheated the lower portion of the catalyst. There is a decent chance the temp readings on the lower part of the tube are much higher than the lower portion. I think it might be worth trying lower temps.
Since if you favour the output of ether and ethylene rather than ethylene and hydrogen. Unless I am mistaken you can simply recycle the ether into the ethanol as ether boils at 34.6C where as does so at -103c. It also might not hurt to purify the ethanol to avoid introducing any water into the system, which you can do via something like an off the shelf air still. This and it might be worth using nichrome wire along with insulation kaowool.