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Home Photo Galleries Equipment Galleries Simon Jansen • Avondale, New Zealand

Keeping beer cold while you’re out in the shed has always been a challenge. Finding the ultimate solution was a trial and error process. My first solution was to surround my beers with ice. Unfortunately that small quantity of ice would not keep multiple beers cold all day — and no, you cannot, under any circumstances, put ice into the beer.

Obviously, I had to come up with a better solution to the problem. I remembered from some old physics lecture that when a liquid expands into a gas it draws heat from its surroundings. I happened to have a source of suitable liquid in the form of liquid petroleum gas. Naturally, I could not evaporate vast quantities of flammable gas into the closed confines of my garage. That would probably be dangerous. What I needed was a way to remove the dangerous gas. The solution was obvious. The gas is flammable, so why not burn it? Burning the gas with a normal burner would not use up the gas fast enough to give me any serious cooling, so I needed a way to use a lot of fuel very, very quickly. I needed a jet engine!

Engine
Jet engines use a lot of fuel. A small one running in my shed would use enough fuel to sufficiently cool my beer. I went to work. After much investigating, designing, building and dodgy welding, I built my engine.

Warm Beer
You can see the cooling effect on the gas tank by the layer of ice that forms. All that was left was to place the tank in a container of water, add the cans of beer and fire this baby up! And now the results: The experiment was a complete success. The engine itself will run up to 100,000 rpm with exhaust temperatures around 932 ºF (500 ºC) and noise levels in excess of 125 decibels

The beer is successfully chilled to a nice 36 ºF (2 ºC). It’s a good thing, because a cold beer is just what you need when you’re standing in a shed with a jet engine running. Check out more background on my jet engine cooler online at www.asciimation.co.nz/beer.

Setup


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