Pot Heat Sink?

[iamscottym]

I was ordering some new heat sinks for my computer the other day and it reminded me of the heat sink on my jet boil. Has anyone ever played around with using a cpu/vga cooler as a heat sink on a pot? I'm no zelph, but I wouldn't mind tinkering around with this.

-iamscottym

[Bulldawg]

I was ordering some new heat sinks for my computer the other day and it reminded me of the heat sink on my jet boil. Has anyone ever played around with using a cpu/vga cooler as a heat sink on a pot? I'm no zelph, but I wouldn't mind tinkering around with this.

-iamscottym

Oh tell me MORE. I am a network administrator and have tons of those things laying around!!!!

[iamscottym]

Well I'm thinking I'll make a bomb calorimeter and run some tests with zelph's starlyte and my jet boil to calculate the efficiency of each setup. I'll see what heatsinks I can dig up, but I'd like to try a big copper zalman like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118115
and then a small aluminum one like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835101015
(sans fan of course).

I'm thinking some thermal paste between the cooler and the pot will do nicely to attach the two. The kicker here I'm sure is weight. The heatsink on my jetboil is very thin gauge titanium, while even the small aluminum cpu heatsink weighs 1/2 as much as a pot. Mainly I'm interested in seeing what kind of efficiency gains I can get with a heatsink. I'll probably have to get some thin aluminum sheet and make my own heatsink to get the best performance to weight. It might also be possible to drop a cpu heatsink in an acid bath and thin it out that way.

[ubersmack]

I was also going to mention weight, comp heatsinks I think would be a tad heavy to attach to any sort of pot. I would toy around with making your own though. Are you thinking of attaching it to the pot itself permenatly? You could probably get some aluminum and make a nice one yourself. The jetboil one is a very simple design. If you can get ahold of some titanium it would be even better, weld it right on the pot. This could be a very fun project :)

[ubersmack]

Another thought about the thermal paste.. I'm not so sure that would do so well with the extreme temps that a stove would experience. The main idea behind thermal paste is to aid in transfering temps away from an object in a speedy manner to COOL, not to heat.. i would imagine it would be cooked off..

[SlowLightTrek]

Here is some epoxy rated to 650 degrees F. The temp rating might work if you use an alchohol stove. http://www.cotronics.com/vo/cotr/ea_thermallyconductive.htm

[SlowLightTrek]

I was thinking what might work great would be to make a heatsink similar to the one on the jetboil out of aluminum roof flashing from the hardwear store. Just cut out a 1/2" wide ring and bend it into a similar form as jetboils then epoxy it on with that stuff in my other post. Hey I think I'm gonna do that, or try it anyway.

[ubersmack]

Sounds like a good idea, I like the roof flashing thing to, cheap if it doesn't work. I would also test it several times to make sure the epoxy holds up. Let me know for sure how that works and I may toss one together.