
Reverse Microwave Chills Beer In 45 Seconds - crosbytho
http://foodbeast.com/2013/10/24/v-tex-reverse-microwave/
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sparktherapy
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/](http://www.v-tex-technology.co.uk/) It
mentions nothing about "microwave", and is just a deceptive title on that food
blog's part.

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

~~~
fragsworth
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.

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

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

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

~~~
petercooper
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.

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

~~~
aneisf
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.

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

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

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

~~~
paultannenbaum
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.

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

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aaren
I think you need to experiment.

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epo
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.

~~~
wahsd
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

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

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aaren
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.

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mrmekon
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.

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

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lumberjack
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA)

~~~
jsilence
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.

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derekp7
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.

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bluedino
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?

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dclowd9901
Pool of antifreeze? Who cares! In all honesty, a shared tub sounds like a
horrible idea.

~~~
jlgreco
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.

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math0ne
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.

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adanto6840
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.

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

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ginko
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling)

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iblaine
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.

~~~
fragsworth
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?

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computerbob
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.

~~~
falcolas
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.

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aaren
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.

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

~~~
jlgreco
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.

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nealabq
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?

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

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

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

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JoeAltmaier
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!

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wtvanhest
45 seconds is too long for a beer!

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

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

~~~
tehwalrus
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_vortex)

~~~
leephillips
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).

~~~
tehwalrus
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.

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diadara
Someone is going to make a lot of money.

~~~
teddyh
…in 20 years, when the patent expires.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
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.

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teddyh
> 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._

