Cooling with miners? (reverse air cycle)

[thak777]

There are a lot of great projects out there using old miners as space heaters. I'm wondering if anyone is working on the opposite: using miners to provide cooling.

In my previous life in aircraft reliability, I worked with air cycle machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_cycle_machine), which use the ridiculously hot bleed air off of aircraft engines to cool--yes, cool--the aircraft cabin. I've seen these "reverse cycle air conditioners"--mostly in Australia, I guess--that provide both heating & cooling in the same unit.

This makes me think that there's reason to believe that it'd be possible to use mining boards as the heat element in the devices: if you could run old miners for both heating AND cooling, I think that'd be an absolute game changer.

Is anyone aware of any projects like this?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Biggest problem is that it requires power to run the compression stages and in the air-cycle systems on aircraft that power of course comes from the engines plus the temperature delta is far lower. Miners have no 'excess' power to run it because power efficiency is driven to be as high as possible and the lower inlet temp would seriously impact the efficiency of the process.

[Marvelman]

The idea of using heat from mining boards for cooling is pretty interesting.  It makes me think of "absorption refrigerators" - these things use heat to drive the cooling process.  So in theory, extra heat from the mining boards could maybe be used for cooling too.  I'm no engineer, so not sure if it would really work.  But there are portable fridges for camping and RVs that run on propane, with no electricity needed.  Those use heat as the power source and don't have compressors.  The mining boards produce lots of heat while working, so maybe some of that could be harnessed.  The tech might already exist.  If not, probably needs an engineer to design it properly.  But I think it has potential if done right.


How a Propane Refrigerator Functions