Imagine we have a high powered spacecraft. Rather than the typical design of having large radiators that are limited in their ability to radiate heat, we want our spacecraft to be able to shed heat quickly. If it's using large amounts of power, it needs to do so, so how can we get rid of that excess heat?
I had the momentary idea that you could use a coolant liquid that was vented into space. As it expands in three dimensions each little droplet is radiating heat away and should cool quickly. Of course we only have so much coolant on board, so we need to recover this stuff. This made me think of venting it into a thin balloon that would be inflated by the expansion of the coolant, but then why not just keep the balloon inflated and run the coolant over it's surface instead, which just gets us back to radiators. Maybe we can use a thinner walled balloon and thus a larger one with this method as it doesn't require any pipes for the coolant to flow through, so maybe it could still be made to work. Maybe the collector doesn't need to be inflated but could be a self-opening net that's put in place before the coolant is vented and that doesn't need to encompass a full 360 degrees but when brought in can still capture all of the coolant.
However, that got me thinking that maybe there are better ways to recover the coolant. What if instead of a balloon and coolant fluid we used a magnetic field and something like iron filings (that have been heated by our energy intensive processes). The iron filing are vented into space, allowed to cool (briefly) and then an electromagnet is turned on to bring them back in? I'm a little doubtful that this would work as the energy use of the magnet needs to be small enough that it doesn't just produce more heat than we've vented this way, but it seems to me that we'd need a pretty strong magnetic field to get the iron filings back if we want them to expand to a large enough volume for this scheme to make any sense (otherwise, again, just build a radiator).
If our energy use is high enough we might be able to produce some sort of hot plasma that's vented out of the ship and then caught in a magnetic field that's always on and thus brought back into the ship that way somehow?
I guess in some sense these are just radiators with creative ideas of how to design the pipes.
These are just some random thoughts and probably none of these schemes would work in practice, but they seemed interesting enough to me thatI thought they might be fun to play with. :)
I had the momentary idea that you could use a coolant liquid that was vented into space. As it expands in three dimensions each little droplet is radiating heat away and should cool quickly. Of course we only have so much coolant on board, so we need to recover this stuff. This made me think of venting it into a thin balloon that would be inflated by the expansion of the coolant, but then why not just keep the balloon inflated and run the coolant over it's surface instead, which just gets us back to radiators. Maybe we can use a thinner walled balloon and thus a larger one with this method as it doesn't require any pipes for the coolant to flow through, so maybe it could still be made to work. Maybe the collector doesn't need to be inflated but could be a self-opening net that's put in place before the coolant is vented and that doesn't need to encompass a full 360 degrees but when brought in can still capture all of the coolant.
However, that got me thinking that maybe there are better ways to recover the coolant. What if instead of a balloon and coolant fluid we used a magnetic field and something like iron filings (that have been heated by our energy intensive processes). The iron filing are vented into space, allowed to cool (briefly) and then an electromagnet is turned on to bring them back in? I'm a little doubtful that this would work as the energy use of the magnet needs to be small enough that it doesn't just produce more heat than we've vented this way, but it seems to me that we'd need a pretty strong magnetic field to get the iron filings back if we want them to expand to a large enough volume for this scheme to make any sense (otherwise, again, just build a radiator).
If our energy use is high enough we might be able to produce some sort of hot plasma that's vented out of the ship and then caught in a magnetic field that's always on and thus brought back into the ship that way somehow?
I guess in some sense these are just radiators with creative ideas of how to design the pipes.
These are just some random thoughts and probably none of these schemes would work in practice, but they seemed interesting enough to me thatI thought they might be fun to play with. :)
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2xTNLPB
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