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The Picard Maneuver @startrek.website

1y ago

Yeah, my tea has water-cooling

Would this even work? Lol

71 comments

Now run your straw through a concentric larger straw and pump -30C glycol through the annulus. You can get your 96C tea down to 54C in seconds! Think of the efficiencies gained!!

Use a metal straw to improve heat conduction.
Increase the surface area and time for heat extraction to occur with extra loops in the water part (do they make metal silly straws?)
Get really fancy and use a counterflow chiller: create a two layer straw, where tea goes through one layer while cold water goes through the other layer in the opposite direction (obviously with an outlet somewhere besides your teacup)
- But the goal here isn't to maximize cooling, you still want the tea to be hot, just drinkably hot rather than dangerously.
  
  You need to calibrate your coolant water temperature to provide the ideal amount of cooling for you.
- Use a metal straw to improve heat conduction.
  While metal is a better conductor of heat, when looking at the effective rate of cooling you need to take the wall thickness into account. I think a plastic straw with it's micrometer thin walls is unbeatable.
  Edit: I have trouble finding information on wall thickness of drinking straws, it one source says they are 130-250 μm thick. That is thicker than I expected.
  
  Counterpoint: drink a cold drink through a plastic straw and a metal straw, with your fingers on the straw. See which one feels cooler.
- This man HVACs

Very low surface area heat exchanger you've got there! Gotta do several more loops under the water to get efficient heat transfer.
- Hear me out, what if we added racing stripes to the straw?
  
  Some LEDs on the bowl would probably be more efficient.
- its also very low volume so i think it will be fine for the job
  
  Yeah, at slow enough drinking speeds there would likely be some noticeable difference in temperature after passing through the radiator, it probably just won’t be massive.
- Well that's why they invented crazy straws after all!

I love plastic straw in hot tea!

Motherfucker never heard of ice cubes
- Ice cubes can water down your drink. Use a large, frozen, steel ball bearing so you can instead get some nice heavy metal poisoning to accompany it.
  (Don't actually do this)
  
  You should use lead instead of steel. The higher density makes the effect longer lasting.
  
  There are alloys of stainless steel (I forget the numbers off the top of my head, it’s been more than a few years since I worked in that field) that are perfectly fine and compatible for food/grade hot-process work.
- They're not a monster
  
  I use wine balls when I want iced coffee lol

Y'all trying to come up with ways to cool it while I'm using my 5 temperature setting electric kettle to get the water hot enough to steep tea, but not boil.
- But can you play snake on your kettle
- I bought a kettle with a temperature selector. I have one degree of precision. Which is often overkill. It's surprisingly useful to be able to heat water at non scalding temps. Especially for cleaning tasks, actually.
  
  Also good for not ruining (even cheap) tea.
  Matcha 70C, green 80, I do my coffee at 85C.
- That sounds luxurious. Do you love it?
  
  Yes, and it wasn't very expensive.
- Even the lowest steeping temperature is too hot to drink IMO. And with black tea you should be steeping it at almost boiling.

Just get one of those handy cupholders that come free with lots of electronics:

They also work for quick thawing.

Hmmm microplastics soup

Wouldn’t the plastic straw melt in the hot tea? Maybe need metal or silicone straw adapter hooked onto plastic straw in heat exchanger 🤔
- Don't think most plastic straws would melt, but they would probably soften and might infuse more chemicals into your beverage than it would if it were cold. At this point I'd just go for the obvious solution of repurposing an old heat exchanger from an AC unit or something. The strange taste will go away after a few times (probably).
  
  Personally I would use my knowledge in aerodynamics by blowing on the tea before sipping
  
  Tasty coolant flavoured tea
- Just go full metal. Better heat transfer.
- It's plastic not wax
  
  Paper cups are wax coated, so it also depends on the wax as well.
  
  It turns out plastic can melt. Crazy, I know

MacGyver at Wish
- MacGyver gets bored when he doesn't have something important to do.

It would cool it down, but how much would be the question.
Fridges cool your water in them using the same principal, a loop of tubing is in the fridge which cools the water as it passes through.
- It would entirely depend on how fast you suck.
  Even moderately cool water would work if you just drank slow enough, and ice water wouldn't work if you drank too fast.
  I'm sure some engineer could do the math on how cold the water would have to be to cool boiling water at maximum vacuum.
  
  As well as the medium of the straw. It would cool much faster if you had a stainless steel straw versus plastic, which would insulate better.

Just mix them together.

Assuming the water is cooled, yes, this would decrease the temperature of the tea. Probably not by a ton, but it would make a difference.
- It just has to be colder than the tea, not necessarily "cooled". As the tea passes through it, some heat will dissipate to the water.

71 comments