Oh, that’s right, I forgot that Lucas makes refridgerators too!

(owner of more MG’s than any sane person should)

If you were decompress the beer (such as with a vacuum pump) to the point where it vaporized, the temperature of the “beer vapor” would be lower than the liquid beer. At that point, heat would flow into the beer vapor from its surroundings due to the temperature difference. When you removed the vacuum, the beer vapor would condense into beer at a slightly higher temperature than it started.

Why not take an air conditioning approach, to avoid freezing problems? Compress the beer (does it count as a “container” if you’re just sealing, then unsealing, the tubes?) so it heats up more, then cool it to just above freezing, then decompress it and serve. During decompression it will cool itself! Ehhhh????

Take a long spiral tube of copper, and put it into a pvc tube. the beer runs from top to bottom, so find a thickness of copper tubing that gets all the beer through in just under the time required.

Then take a big-ass keg of ice cold water, and gravity feed it through the pvc piping from bottom to top. Its a simple counter-current system, and should get the beer to 0 celius with no freezing issues.

Thats a good idea, but I was thinking, why run from the outside to the inside? why not just alternate them, outside outside, inside inside, and so forth, that way, all your plates would be interchangeable, and be the same size.

Garret:

About the coil system, it can be as complex as you make it, personally, if I was going to build one of these, I’d build a tight coil around a foot in diameter and about 2′ tall then build a insulated styrofoam outer and inner sheath that could be be moved down over the coil to add or insulation and thus adjust the temperature. I’d use plain old ice water for the coolant, so as to avoid sidestep the freezing problem altogether (remember, the beer can be in the machine for up to a minute, so as long as you’ve got allot of pipe you probably don’t need a super cold water bath to get it down to 38). Also, I’d add some paddles or something to circulate the water, to keep the water around the coils from warming up too much.

True, using a coil and water bath is pretty much the standard engineering solution for this sort of thing, but I’d be surprised if someone came up with something within the rules that beats it for cost or effectiveness.

-Mojo

What you described is sounds a lot like a plate chiller/heat exchanger used in conjunction with a pump. Cold water passes through, chilling the plates and then is given to the hot beer going the other direction. Good idea with reducing the sizes.

-The gimpster
It might have to do with how CO2 is absorbed. The hot beer can is ready to release all of it’s CO2 at the temperature, but as it cools, the CO2 redissolves into the beer. Super cooling it may instead leave you with a flat beer. Though I doubt you’d lose ALL your carb. Then again, ever open a warm beer then try to cool it? Not tasty.

Anything with a copper coil used by other teams tended to freeze to the inside and plug the pipe. Using something like that in the -70deg C slurry I’ve used would be nearly instant. It’s a matter of finding ways to tune it so that it goes in hot, but comes out the end, just above freezing.

Believe me, I’ve competed since the beginning, it’s tricky.

http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/3748/ideaok9.jpg

Have a number of plates of copper (I would prefer silver but it is unrealistic unless you rich lol). Have the drink poured into a small funnel/resivoir with a small opening at the base to allow the drink to flow out at a controlled speed.

In the copper plates have a channel grooved out circling from the outside reducing itself to the centre of the plate.

The plate would need to be cooled by some form (probly peltier (sp?)).

Each plate would have a copper tube drop the drink from the above plate centre to the below plate outside groove. Also each plate would be reduced in size from the above plate.

After calculating and testing you would come to the required number of plates and the required flow rate to cool the drink to the desired temperature.

At the bottom of the plates you would place your glass and let the drink make its way to your glass.

For bars etc you could have many grooves carved out to allow multiple drinks to be cooled at once without them mixing, at the bottom and centre of each plate have copper pipes flowing the drinks out to grooves/glasses to avoid mixing the drinks.

here is a quick ms paint quick idea of what it would look like;