FreezerWave, Appliance freezes food in one minute. [idea]

[marty]

Its called a FreezerWave. About the size of a microwave. Makes ice cubes or freezes anything in about 1 minute. I hate waiting 6 hours for ice cubes to freeze. I want ice and I want it now. Would any one like a Popsicle? I can heat a cup of coffee in 1 minute. Want to freeze things at the same speed.

Where to buy a FreezerWave? How would I build one?

If I go outside in the winter with no shirt I will freeze faster if it is windy. Would a fan in a real cold freezer work? Are there any industrial applications that use something like this?

 

[MikeFairbanks]

There's no such thing as a machine that makes air colder. Freezers don't exist.

Heat exchangers, however, do exist. In other words, you can't make the air colder. You have to get rid of the warm air.


What about a vacuum? In space you have radiation, but not convection. So, if an object is suspended in the air, and you pulled all the air out of that box, how quickly would the temperature drop?


Flash-freezing is an option.


And, of course, you can always go buy some liquid nitrogen. That'll freeze anything in a second, including your fingers. If you put a juice box into a container of liquid nitrogen you'll have a Popsicle in a lot less than sixty seconds.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_freezing

 

[liveforphysics]

Are there any industrial applications that use something like this?

Google "forced temp chamber" and "themal shock chamber"


They flow -80degC air over an object at high speeds. Things get chilly quickly.


However, to remove energy rapidly, you require a delta-T from latent heat of vaporization of a low temp refrigeration gas boiling. Sometimes a couple of stages of refrigeration. If you had to give a rule of thumb, you're going to need about 10x more power and 10x more volume for the device to transfer energy out of something as quickly as you transfer energy into something.

 

[cal3thousand]

I don't think there's anything that would work on the same principle. Microwaves excite the water molecules at the right wavelength. You'd have to figure out how to use a energy wave to suppress molecular excitation.

Maybe, it could work, since it is possible to attenuate a sound wave with an out-of-phase sound wave. Not sure if that can even be theoretically possible to time it with such frequencies.

 

[bigmoose]

Back in grad school we would dip beer for 4 or 5 seconds in a 2 gallon LN2 dewar and it was chilled to perfection. 6 to 8 seconds and the bottle shattered and then the dewar...

 

[thepronghorn]

Check this out.

http://web.mit.edu/imoyer/www/portfolio/absolutzero/index.html

 

[marty]

Countertop Blast Chiller

$4,699.19
194°F to 37°F in 240 minute freezing cycle. That's 4 hours

We need a faster method to freeze food. Our goal here is a $100 counter top FreezerWave for sale at WalMart.

 

[amberwolf]

Living in a hot desert city, I have frequently wished for this.

When I was at DeVry back in the 80s, a handful of friends over in the engineering program, including some of the teachers, tried to work out a way to use some form of EMF or sound waves to chill food instead of heating it, and they came up nil. At best, they could (theoretically, as nothing was ever built) cancel out specific wavelengths of thermal radiation from the object in question at specific distances or directions from the object, so you couldn't "see" that it was hot, but actually using any of the methods to cool the object would not (in theory) have worked. Plus, it usually would have heated up stuff around the object, or even the object itself, quite significantly.

I can't pretend to understand the math they went thru trying to figure this out, but they spent almost two years on the idea while I was still there, and had been pondering it for a while before I started there. I assume that they continued to work on the idea afterwards, but since I've never heard of anything like this, I presume they didn't figure out any practical ways to do it.

Liquid nitrogen is about the only common way I can think of to flash-freeze something, that I myself could get hold of and do, easily.

 

[strantor]

Trying to win a diamond mountain bike?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haan3Tz0SJk