Re: Forced Gas Quenching

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: Mddeming-at-aol-dot-com 

In a message dated 5/4/04 8:36:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
tesla-at-pupman-dot-com writes:

Stop me if I'm on the wrong track, but how about using the guts of a
refrigerator for this?  High pressure/small bore tube leads into gap
manifold producing gas blast, gas passes through heat exchanger, then back
to pump and back to the gap again.  Would this not provide both quench and
cooling?

It would obviously help if we were to use a high-dielectric strength gas
which is also a refrigerant.

Equipment would not be too large or expensive.

Hi M,

     Yes, in principle this would work. The difficulty to be overcome, as I 
see it is the dT/dt on the cooling side. Most refrigerators operate between 
reservoirs of say 0 F. and 100 F. A TC gap works between an ambient temp of 
~75 F and an arc temp of hundreds of degrees. Depending on how much heat is 
picked up from the quenching by how much of the gas per unit time, it may 
be tricky determining the necessary volume and gas circulation velocity 
which would allow the system to cool it sufficiently. Another possible 
problem point is the duty cycle.  It seems that this system would have to 
operate continuously while the coil is running. Most refrigerator 
compressors are designed to run for only a few minutes each hour or so, in 
a pattern of quick pull-down - slow warming, quick pull-down - slow 
warming, etc. This makes it, if feasible, then not a trivial adaptation.
Anyone got a good thermodynamic/fluid mechanics simulator program out there 
to go with the TC models?

Matt D.
Matt D.