So this school jollidays on going on a trip to my dads house, my dad owns a foundry so there is no shortage of tools and metal lying around. My plan is to fully submerse a computer into some liquid including the PSU. What type of liquid should I use? Water is fine for 12v, but it will conduct the 240v, anyone know about distilled water? I have thought about oil but the aim of the case is to make it pretty silent and very cold thus something will have to be pumped around and I have never seen a pump for oil that isn't made for a boat. So has anyone here ever tryed it? tips or suggestions welcome!
There are always the more expensive, manufactured, non-conductive liquids such as the PF-5080 that Nexxo used in project Metaversa.
Actually, water is not fine for 12V. A pure power circuit might run for a while in water, but you will eventually remove every scrap of metal on one pole by electrolysis. When it comes to sensitive digital circuits, they probably won't work at all in tap water. While distilled water is fine to start with, there is no way you can keep it chemically clean forever, and as soon as you get some electrolysis started, the water will only conduct more and more. Oil is proabaly the only workable solution here, but you will need to make sure the oil you choose does not do any permanent damage to plastic details, tank, tank seals, hoses or pump. Best solution is probably to find a 12V electrical oil pump for some kind of vehicle. I could immagine some kinds of oils doing long term damage to plastic sockets and the epoxy that chips and circuit boards are made from. The hoses and tank seals are just about getting the right kind of materials, and the pump should be fine if you use a dedicated oil pump. I would probably make the tank out of real glass to try to avoid long term discoloration that could occour to acrylics.
Fluroinert if you have the money mate (not all of us are as rish as Nexxxo ). I think youd still have to have something to make the liquid flow and some way of making the container air tight so the Fluroinert (ie liquid money) doesnt evaporate... I read a thread of some guys who used fluroinert with liquid notrogen (the Fluroinert jellified at those low temps), and with dry ice pellets - the whole project cost thousands of AUS dollars. I think it was at overclockers.com but cannea rem.
your thinking of www.octools.com oldie but a goodie, the long running favourite is transformer oil, they use it to cool transformer boxes and it can take thousands of volts and multiple amps so a wall powersupply should be fine. Almost any sort of oil would be fine, from car to veggie, but transformer or the likes would work best. Distilled water in theory would work, but it's also a solvent and corrosive so as soon as the leads and traces started to corrode it's resistance would go down. Flourinert is something on the order of $100+ a gallon if youre considering that route.
Many vegitable oils can contain some water, they can allso go bad (the food kind of "go bad", not the accident kind) I would go for mineral oils. Just stay away from silicone oil as it can "walk" out of bottles etc if they are not air tight.
They will obviously have to be placed outside the oil. Even if the drive didn't take damage from the oil, the oil has a different density from air, and will change the distace between platters and heads, thus causeing the drive to not function. This is theoretical thou, since liquid is most likely to stop the platters from even starting, much less getting up to several thousand RPM. Same with CD-ROMs and other things with moving parts.
Vegetable oil and mineral oil are common for this type of use... so to speak. That said, this use is hardly common. As noted, I'd avoid having the optical and hard drives submerged. You could ruin the hard drive if it gets inside (thru the vent hole I suppose, as that's for maintaining some air within the drive) and it would be a PITA to deal with CDs even if it wouldn't ruin the drive (not sure how well laser takes to oil). I'd build a small compartment under/over the submerged area (probably over and it doesn't need to be seperated if it doesn't get jostled around too much) to put the optical/hard drives in. I'd do a lot of research first, you could easily kill a comp by doing this wrong. :google:, if we had such a smilie
I was thinking of building seperate cages for each drive so they remain cool but dry. I have looked at most of the submersed projects around on the web, I have just got a shuttle mainboard, 2.0GHZ P4 celery edition, Radeon7000 and a stick of 256MB DDR ram(pc2700) So this should make a pefect test system!
yeah, sorry but it has been done before. a quick example i bumped into the other day: http://www.mofocases.com/cases.php?case_id=38 he appears not to have the drives submerged.
