Reverse Microwave Chills Beer In 45 Seconds | Hacker News Reader

Reverse Microwave Chills Beer In 45 Seconds

foodbeast.com

74 pointscrosbytho79 comments

I can't watch videos where I work, so could someone briefly explain what this does? Is it anything to do with actual microwave radiation, or is it using accelerated conduction?

EDIT: if only YouTube is blocked... there's a video available here: http://www.v-tex-technology.co.uk/ It mentions nothing about "microwave", and is just a deceptive title on that food blog's part.

It's nothing to do with microwaves. It sloshes the drink around in a bath of chilled water while rotating it. It appears to save energy by keeping the chilled water thermally isolated from the environment rather than keeping an entire fridge cool. Very similar to the Salted Ice Water method[1]

[1] http://www.wikihow.com/Chill-a-Drink-Quickly

It's not deceptive, it's figurative. Not everything has to be rigorously literal.

Enough people have already complained about the title that I'd say the author made a stupid choice. It was confusing until reading the article, and I'd say it was link-bait for suggesting some kind of new physics technology.

It's basically a video of people looking busy in front of CADs and a woman coming straight from a catwalk trying to use the machine without breaking her nails.

I also had the distinct feeling that the advertisement director gave the order to make as unnecessarily large gestures as possible. "OK honey, now show an unprecedented amount of enthusiasm while you open this machines beer can hatch."

This has nothing to do with microwave technology at all. A sad face is warranted.

Reverse microwaves? The author of the post must be completely, 100% scientifically illiterate.

I think she meant reverse microwave oven. As in, rather than heating fast, it cools fast.

Yeah, I think it's just a pragmatic layman's term for a good headline. I've complained over the years to my wife I'd like a "reverse microwave" for exactly this use, so it certainly clicked with me.

But anyone who usually understands "microwave" as electromagnetic energy will find this title extremely confusing.

I think most people on HN are familiar with both microwaves and microwave ovens. It's not really hard to see which one the author was going for.

That is like calling ice a reverse fire. If the technology doesn't have anything to do with microwaves, I don't see how the "reverse microwave" adds anything but confusion. It's not as though "chills beer in 45 seconds" is so vague as to require a strained microwave analogy.

I loved this comment, why is it being downvoted?

The headline writer is simply speaking figuratively, for maximum effect in constrained space. This is easily understood by a general audience, but sometimes misunderstood by the extra-literal/extra-critical mindset often seen in HN threads.

In the headline, 'Microwave' stands synecdochally for 'microwave oven' and then also for the more-general category 'fast-heating appliance'.

When there are multiple ways to interpret something, assume the interpretation that credits the writer/speaker with some sense, not an interpretation that is most-literal or most-amenable as the setup for an insult.

I voted you up for truth.

But... don't discount the profound disappointment that a headline like that generates in those of us who do know how a microwave works. We were teased with the idea of learning something we thought would alter our understanding of the universe -- some sort of microwave version of the peltier effect[1] -- only to find out it was something as pedestrian as poetic license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect

Those who know physics would hopefully know that a cooling microwave would be a blatant violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

In soviet russia...

SCNR

Oddly enough, your response is basically the same sort of overly-narrow literalism that gojomo was complaining about, just from the other direction.

No, it's not.

"reverse microwave" is correct in a sense, because as gojomo pointed out, the author meant it as a way to convey the concept of "rapid-heating appliance".

"You can't do x because of thermodynamics" actually was incorrect, and didn't take into account multiple specific instances which show that closed systems can create such results.

No it wouldn't - as long as the device, target and environment heat up as a whole. For ex, laser cooling where a laser reflects off a surface with more energy than it started with.

I must admit... Before I read the article, I spend a moment trying to figure out how they got microwaves out of the the spin energy of water molecules. Thankfully, that doesn't happen.

It's cool, but I doubt it will compete on price:performance with a bucket of ice.

If you add salt to the ice it'll chill even faster.

Salt, and water to increase the contact area with the can/bottle (unless you want to wait for the ice to melt).

Since we are going off on a tangent, a cool camping hack when you don't have ice is to stuff a beer in a tube sock, dunk it in water, and hang/tie it to a tree branch in the shade. If there is even a touch of wind it will be nice and cold in 10 minutes.

Evaporative beer cooling.. very clever. I wonder if there is a market for a product dedicated/optimized for this (incorporated drawstring/hanger, ideal material, etc.)

"Billy Mays here for Beer Sock!"

This is much more elegant than the spinning trick, as it doesn't require energy input.

Works really well in deserts, if you keep the sock in the shade.

I wonder if you wound up the sock and let it spin if you'd get something virtually equivalent to this machine.

I think you need to experiment.

Didn't mythbusters do an episode on this once? Fastest way to cool a beer, or something like that? They concluded that the fastest was to use a CO2 fire extinguisher.

In rural areas in Peru I've seen natives dunking closed beer bottles on water, then add nitrogen based fertilizer to get them chilled really fast! (A strong endotermic reacion happens)

I have some doubt on that, but I can't give you any numbers.

With price, you have to consider the energy cost of freezing the ice.

With performance, this thing is less like a microwave and more like a convection oven. A bucket of ice chills the content from outside to the center. This machine creates a spinning vortex inside the beverage container, bringing the warmer center to the outside to be chilled by the surface (by which this machine blows cold water over it).

The idea behind the machine is pretty simple actually. I think this belongs in the clever invention category.

Sounds like the same general concept as an ice cream maker. Spinning the liquid in a closed container is the fancy part I guess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electric_ice_cream_maker.j...

Is this new? I can remember wine coolers in British supermarkets in the early 90s where you placed a wine bottle into a receptacle, pressed a button and extracted a very cold bottle about 90 seconds later. I'm guessing they just circulated cold water round the bottle.

Whole Foods (Large American grocer targeting healthy and alternative lifestyles) still has what seems to be just that at their stores in the wine departments. It's a rather drab looking cylindrical device with a pool of water in it that swirls on button press.

Now people at Whole Foods are going to be scratching their heads as to why the sudden a bunch of geeks are lining up to use the wine chiller no one has touched in the last five years. lol

Do people not use these? People use the one at a supermarket near me all the time.

The 'Rankine vortex' is a simple model for a vortex in which the centre is in solid body rotation and the rest is a free, irrotational* vortex.

From the looks of their video, the bottle forms most of the solid body core. The velocity in the rest of the fluid goes as u~1/r and is pure tangential (streamlines are circles around the vortex centre).

This isn't anything special, it's just a pretty regular unforced vortex.

*irrotational here means that the vorticity (defined at a point) is zero, not that the system doesn't look spinny.

Homebrewers have been doing this by hand for years. I do this often at parties when I don't have space in the fridge.

Fill a pitcher half full of ice, add cold water to above the ice, and a bunch of salt. Insert bottle, and spin by hand for 30-60 seconds.

This device saves on the cleanup time, in exchange for having another permanent appliance on the counter.

This appears to be a waste of space and money...It's the same concept as other "fast chiller" devices.

I'm skeptical about the energy claims. How much of a difference is the continuous cooling of a can of beverage going to cost when you still have to keep the refrigerator running anyway?

Plus energy grids prefer a gradual and predictable energy draw than a sudden spike. Otherwise we end up with scenarios like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA

I think the idea is that there is no more need to keep all the beverages cooled the whole time. The bottles can be stored at room temperature and the customers only cool those bottles down they buying.

So the energy savings are not in the individual cooling process.

I can't find it online, but there was an article covering this topic in the April 1989 (if I recall) issue of Radio Electronics, referring to modifications to reverse a Microwave to turn it into a Macrowave oven to cool things fast. Of course, it was their annual April Fools article, but very entertaining none the less.

There used to be a chilling device as a party store near my house. There was a tub of super-chilled green or blue liquid that was in a whirlpool of sorts, and you could dunk your just-purchased drink in there for 1 minute and it would be cold when you took it out.

But doesn't beer benefit from always staying cold?

Pool of antifreeze? Who cares! In all honesty, a shared tub sounds like a horrible idea.

I'm sure the outside of your bottle/can has seen worse horrors than that. If you are concerned by that sort of thing, you should probably make a habit of wiping them off before consuming anyway.

Beer does not benefit from always staying cold. If you get bored, it is relatively easy to do a double-blind test.

...but if you have a bottle conditioned ale, sometimes you can tell the difference because the 'warm' one can reactivate the yeasts and change the flavor slightly.

Not really. Some people call it "skunking" when one keeps changing the temperature of bottled beer, but it's harmless. Real skunking is exposure to light.

They used to have something like this in Canadian liquor commissions back in the day because they were no allowed to refrigerate beer and wine (archaic liquor laws in Canada). Super cold swirling water, you stick you shit in for 5 mins while you browse around, worked pretty well.

Sounds like it should be substantially better than those cheap bottle coolers that usually just have a suction cup and a small electric motor to spin a bottle while it's covered in ice.

Definitely a really neat & smart concept -- wonder what it'll cost though.

This looks like the same thing, except it's spinning in icy water (look at the last few seconds) in a bigger space.

Ah, yes.

I was hoping this would be using something like laser cooling[1], which can be though of as the actual reverse process of microwave heating.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling

I'm too lazy to dig up the kickstarter project. But basically you can accomplish the same result (chilling beer quickly) with better results by attaching a beer to the end of a drill and spinning it in a bucket of ice.

I guess you could accomplish the same result, but it's quite a bit less convenient with a bucket of ice.

1. Fill ice cube tray with water 2. Freeze ice cube tray for an hour 3. Take ice cube tray out of freezer 4. Empty ice cube tray into bucket 5. Put drink in bucket 6. Spin drink (with what? your hands?) 7. Take drink out 8. Dump bucket in sink 9. Put the bucket somewhere

As opposed to this device, where it looks like you just put the drink in, press a button, and take it out?

Spin Chill [1].

1: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1139594493/spin-chill-wa...

Looks about the same as spinning by beer in my freezers ice tray for about 20 seconds. I would love to know how long you have to wait until the can of beer won't explode.

According to that website, because they form a "Rankine vortex" in the beverage itself, the carbonation is not disturbed. Not sure I buy that, but that's their sales pitch.

a 'Rankine vortex' is a fancy name for a very simple theoretical model.

It's just a circular vortex in which u~1/r and there may or may not be a solid body core. A lot of spinny vortices are like this.

I'm not sure where they think their rankine vortex is - whether in the bottle or round the outside - or whether they are accounting for friction when calling it that.

How is she going to open her Heineken with those nails [0:45] ?

You can use the side of your finger with a sort of rolling action to lift the tab. I learned that a few years ago after I had my finger slammed in a doorframe pretty hard.

Instead, why not put CO2 dry-ice cubes in your drink? Or a spritz of liquid nitrogen? Or drop in a shot glass of liquid helium? Or super-cooled metal balls?

Dry ice will, ironically, make your soda go completely flat as it constantly agitates the drink as it boils/sublimes away.

but it'll make water pretty carbonated (though not to soda's level). or at least have the same bitter, bubbly flavor (never really looked up if that's actually what happens)

Cubes of frozen alcohol might work. Maybe with a little frozen C02 mixed in for certain drinks.

I love it! Now I just have to figure out how to generate a temperature cold enough to do it.

One of the other problems is that if you cool too quickly, you get an ice layer around the cooling, which then inhibits you from cooling any further. (Note I say "inhibits", not "prevents".)

What a Rube-Goldberg contraption! Here's what: make it simple, put a one-can version in the arm of my La-Z-Boy recliner and I'm in!

45 seconds is too long for a beer!

Wouldn't it be simpler to just have beer that doesn't taste so bad you need to chill it to make it drinkable? :)

This shaking is certainly going to make cokes to explode when open.

it says it uses a Rankine Vortex[1] where a substantial amount of the velocity profile is zero - thus it doesn't "disturb carbonation". As others have pointed out, this is exactly what a lot of other "fast chill" tech already does.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_vortex

It says that, but the flow inside the can will be three-dimensional and not well modeled by the Rankine vortex. And no, the Rankine velocity profile is nowhere zero.

This gadget exploits a common technique for enhancing heat transfer; another example are pipes designed to transport fluid while also causing it to come to thermal equilibrium with the environment as quickly as possible: these pipes sometimes feature rifling which spins the fluid as it flows through them.

If this doesn't lead to carbonation explosions it's because the spinning is not very fast and doesn't lead to much shear.

In short, this is very well understood, in fact utterly routine, technology.

EDIT: On second thought the combined canned fluid + bath fluid together might roughly be considered Rankine-like; this might be what they mean. In that case the fluid inside the can would be in (very roughly) solid-body motion, which implies little agitation (shear).

apologies about the error - wiki article says the "remaining components" are zero, which means there's something that isn't, my bad.

Yes, that's what I read - two different domains with independent (or nearly independent?) flow, which means you could design it carefully to avoid a lot of shear in the centre - which is (on a skim reading) roughly what a Rankine vortex is.

No, the article explains that is not the case.

Someone is going to make a lot of money.

…in 20 years, when the patent expires.

According to the video, it was funded by the EU in hopes of mass deployment to reduce energy waste in supermarkets (no need to keep an entire open drink case chilled if customers can cool their drinks on their way out the door), and they're planning to license it worldwide for a reasonable price.

> for a reasonable price.

Either the license will be cheap, in which case nobody will get rich from it, or it will be expensive, in which case no product companies will buy the license and nobody will get rich from it. Basically, nobody will get rich from it.

In 20 years, however, when the patent expires, it will be old tech, so probably only a single company will dare to invest research into a new product using this now-old tech. This company will know what happened last time: If the license was expensive, they will try to be cheap to avoid the same mistake twice, and it will be good tech, sold cheaply, which will probably sell well and make them a lot of money. If the license was cheap, they will want to avoid the stigma of the glut of low-quality goods the cheap license allowed back in the day, so the new product will be high-end (probably renamed and re-purposed to another field), which means a high margin, which has a good chance of making them a lot of money.

Basically, some company will probably make a lot of money.

In 20 years, when the patent expires.

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