Homemade liquid nitrogen generator Joule Thomson throttle (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Homemade liquid nitrogen generator Joule Thomson throttle (2013)

homemadeliquidnitrogen.com

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The YouTube channel Hyperspace Pirate[0] has been consistently uploading fantastic videos documenting their attempts to make their own homemade liquid nitrogen machine. They don't shy away from including all the technical details, and throw in plenty of hilarious deadpan humor too. Highly recommend them if you're interested in this topic.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/@HyperspacePirate

Seconded, it's one of my favorite YouTube channels. He's very thorough and the format is entertaining.

Yep. Been watching for a while.

I really want affordable dip and dots at home, and to do some cryogenic experiments that are only possible using liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.

Also those Dewar's arnt cheap, nor are the pumps

I got a 10L dewar on amazon for something like $200 a couple years ago. Certainly has paid for itself in party entertainment.

FWIW, lots of these steel cups that are popular these days are vacuum flasks and cost practically nothing.

What do you do for party entertainment with it? Fog machine? Smoky cocktails?

LN2 ice cream is the big draw-- since you can make single servings of random flavors and the results are really good.

People enjoy playing with high temperature superconductors too.

Okay, now you absolutely must explain how you are employing high temperature superconductors at a party. :) I want to go to some of your parties! I have heard of the ice cream. I must try that perhaps some day...

Homemade Liquid Nitrogen Generator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23828316 - July 2020 (67 comments)

I fabricobbled a liquid nitrogen generator using a cryocooler at home using the same design as Ben at Applied Science [0]. It works very well, I've used it to make liquid nitrogen ice cream many times. It's just slow so I run it overnight.

Applied Science is fantastic channel if you haven't seen it. He's also on HN.

OP's design is much more impressive and hard to build than using a Stirling cryocooler like I did.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PWESWqhD8s

I wonder if in the time since this was written if anyone has found a good source for small turbo expanders.

Liquefied air is a potentially interesting mode of energy storage for islanded solar because it doesn't require high pressure storage (which has safety concerns)-- for that application the round trip efficiency isn't critical as there is nothing else to do with the power... but it can't be a total joke. And the basic JT cycle is really poor. I understand that simply adding an expander and another heat exchange stage can improve it a lot.

If you are dealing with liquid nitrogen from air, then you are probably also dealing with liquid oxygen in the mix. I imaging that at power-storage scales the presence of such amounts of liquid oxygen might create safety issues. Separating it out might nullify any energy storage advantages.

You could embed the chiller in a nitrogen only environment. I am imagining a closed loop system where you are cooling/using the nitrogen on a daily basis.

It's not all that energetically disfavorable to extract oxygen if you're already compressing the gas. There is a lot of demand for concentrated oxygen too, so one could manufacture it as a side product instead of storing it.

As far as 'closed loop' sadly that does break the economics, I think-- part of the reason why cryogenic nitrogen storage is interesting is because the nitrogen expands 800 fold at atmospheric pressure, so the container for the decompressed nitrogen would be gigantic.

I would wager that the regulations governing LO2 generation facilities preclude pursuing that as a side product. I imagine lots of red tape, either already in place or coming soon -- right after someone blows up their neighborhood trying.

Or you can use that liquid oxygen to precool your input, saving some energy over just venting it.

kids, be sure not to have your cigarette lit whilst separating N2 from air.

I love how he used that to try to freeze his cat!

The cat was (mildly) amused!

Are those adds from my/our ISP? How does he, someone who seems to write html somewhat poorly, manage to get so many intrusive ads into this post?

I turned off my adblocker and I see two inline ads, nothing crazy. Not sure what you’re seeing, but I’m quite sure you should install an adblocker.

Yes, adblocker makes it look like I'd expect. Someone along the way is definitely inserting ads, and likely b/c it's http://

If I stop uBlock and shrink the window / enlarge the text so only the main column fits, there's only two inline ads. At normal desktop size though, there's also two sidebar ads and one overlapping box at the bottom. And the ones I got move.

They look like legit AdSense ads, and there's a "liquidnitrogen" comment on one of the related scripts.

The overall quality of this website I'd estimate at least in top 5% of all Web, if not top 1%. The content is superb, the presentation is quite clear.

I was not referring to the content or quality of the page, just the technical sophistication of the presentation, which is at odds with the number of invasive popup ads. It just doesn't seem to be the type of site that would do that, yet here I am with 4 separate banner ads and a popup.

It's an http page, so your ISP//any hop along the way is free to insert anything they want or completely rewrite the content as they wish.

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