I originally was drawn to this material because of the incredible
amount on surface area. One of the other ideas I had was to force compressed
air through the foam - by releasing the pressure at the block it should be
able to achieve sub ambient air temps. So I made a restrictor to go into the
input to the block from an old ink pen and choked the line down to 1/8".
The air supply for this experiment is my 3 horse 20 gallon shop compressor,
not what I would want it next to my desk, but hey this is just an experiment!
I started out at 15psi and booted it up into windows. I
let it run for 10 minutes to try and dry the foam out and it settled at 42c
idle, I slowly cranked up the pressure and once I got to 40psi I had the same
temps as water! I was gonna set it at 50 psi and play some AHL to see if it
could take it, but then the block started to leak air out one of the sides
so I shut it down.
The test was a bust, but I think it shows that with these high
tech materials and their incredible internal surface area it may be possible
to use them for low pressure air cooling and achieve "water cooling" temps.
I don't see any real reason to pursue this design until the
price of high tech materials like this become more reasonable. I am
still going to try and get a hunk big enough for a conventional air sink to
see if it works as well as I think it would.
