14 DAY TRIAL // The inventor is a young student from Albany, New Zealand, who brings a new solution to cool warm beer, with a device that turns the beverage cold in a few seconds. The 22-year-old student produced a portable gadget, which has a cooling capacity four times that of the regular ice and the advantage is that it doesn't water down your drink and could possibly replace the heavy chilly bins which are to be found all over the beaches.
Kent Hodgson has been thinking about how to better cool beer with a portable device, during a barbecue with his friend early this year. The invention was named Huski and is one of the 30 exhibits belonging to the graduates of Massey University's Auckland School of Design at the three-day Design Exposure 2007, beginning today at the Britomart Pavilion.
The device consists of two canisters: a small plastic cooling cell in the shape of a long rod and a larger canister which contains pressurized liquid carbon dioxide. The small plastic cell is docked to the canister containing the liquid carbon dioxide and the liquid expands and cools inside the cooling cell and condenses to form carbonic ice. The plastic cooling cell is now placed inside the bottle and can cool a volume of 330 ml of liquid in a few minutes. The cell can be left in the bottle or put back in the dock to be refilled with carbon dioxide for a future use.
The cooling cell shaped in the form of a long rod reaches the surface temperature of -78 degrees Celsius, having the capacity of cooling the drinks four times faster than the regular ice cubes, but without the disadvantage of diluting the beverage.
Similar drink cooling devices have already been constructed, but using slightly different designs. For example, a half Stirling cycle has been integrated into a beer can. The Stirling cycle consists of compressing a gas which radiates heat. The liquid resulted from the compression of the gas is collected in a tank. The gas is then directed to a separate circuit, in which the liquid expands and cools, absorbing the surrounding heat in the process. The device uses only the second part of the Stirling cycle, in which a liquid expands in a reservoir contained inside the beer can.
One canister containing the compressed carbon dioxide can hold about the volume needed to fill thirty 330 ml bottles, at a cost of 7c each, making it an ideal way to cool your drink when you don't want to carry along the heavy chilly bin during your summer vacations. The invention has already been patented and the young student from New Zealand expects to retail the product at about 50 dollars a piece.
