Watercooling Plate Heat Exchangers?

I've been looking into watercooling, and i've grown to like koolance's brand of blocks. I love the silver look. Matt Black isn't really my thing.

Anyways, i was browsing their site and i ran across this plate heat exchanger - http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/product_info.php?product_id=943

I found this interesting for a dual loop as it allows two liquids to exchange heat without mixing. It could be dedicated to a single loop going through it entirely dedicated to cooling. I wonder if anyone else has any ideas, or anyone familar with something similar?

 

That looks like one i replaced in my central heating boiler lol still got that somewhere

 

I understand what it does, but what the point in it?

 

They're used a lot when home brewing beer. They can cool beer from a near boil (~212*F) to around 68*F, depending on how many plates the exchanger has and how cold the water is, but they are extremely efficient. Obviously, the more plates, the cooler your water will get. Brands that I'm familiar with are Shirron and Blichmann.

 

Basically, for example, say i had one loop cooling my cpu. This heat exchanger connected inline to the out of the cpu block, exchanges the heat the coolant has taken from the cpu and exchanges it to say, a seperate loop that technically doesn't go to a block, it's just a radiator, or multiple radiators.

This could help to cool very efficiently, if the loop was connected in all the right places.

And teelzebub. it makes sense, similar exchangers are used in combination boilers throughout the world today. That obviously says something about their abilities. And these ones by koolance are made specifically for watercooling pcs.

 

But why not just have a normal loop? What's the advantage? For PC cooling you only need liquid. I guess this would be used if you had 2 different types of liquid, right?

Or is it for phase change cooling? it transfers the cold air to the warm liquid that way? I guess then you could have a neater loop set up in your pc. But then again why would you not just go for a water chiller?

 

The only use I could think is if your using some kind of expensive fluid in yourprimary loop. But then thats negated by the cost of this...

 

Just in case you don't know how these work or how they're used, this video may help.

 

As mentioned above; These are only really good if you're using Thermo Electric Chillers and don't want to mix the loops. Another option might be to connect two different tubing sizes, but then it'd work out easier, and cheaper, to just buy fittings to overhaul one half of the loop to the right size, or just buy a couple of converters.

 

Or if you're doing ground source heat exchanging, low pressure loop for in your PC (so your blocks don't explode), high pressure loop for the 250m of tubing laid under ground...

 

Fair point. Although it'd be interesting to see a Pc just spontaneously explode due to water pressure.