Vortex Tubes Cooling With Compressed Air

Machine shops generally already use compressed air and a fast jet of cold air provides both cooling and removal of the chips produced by the tool.

Vortex tubes cooling with compressed air. Vortex tubes are pretty great because they can both heat and cool compressed air with no electricity or moving parts. With no moving parts a vortex tube spins compressed air to separate the air into cold and hot air streams. The high speed air heats up as it spins along the inner walls of the tube toward the control valve. Air that rotates around an axis like a tornado is called a vortex.

However building one can be a little tricky. Vortex tubes cool instantly relying on compressed air spinning in the tube to separate the air into cold and hot air streams. A vortex tube creates cold air and hot air by forcing compressed air through a generation chamber which spins the air at a high rate of speed 1 000 000 rpm into a vortex. Capable of providing up to 2 400 btu hr of cooling and achieving temperatures 50 c below the compressed air temperature the vortex tubes are commonly used for spot cooling cabinet cooling and machine cooling.

If cooling effect is important to the manufacturing application then the cold air flowing out of the vortex tube should be between 60 80. The vortex tube takes compressed air and converts it to cold air as low as minus 50 f minus 46 c at one end and hot air at the other up to 260 f 127 c. Vortex tubes are a compact source of refrigeration and cooling with models ranging from 6 13 inches 150 330 mm long and cooling capacities ranging from 100 6000 btu hour 29 1757 watts. Vortex tubes are used for cooling of cutting tools lathes and mills both manually operated and cnc machines during machining.

Running solely on compressed air meech vortex tubes separate the inlet air into two air flows one very hot the other very cold. Vortex tubes cool instantly relying on compressed air spinning in the tube to separate the air into cold and hot air streams. While french physicist georges ranque is credited with inventing the vortex tube in 1930 itw vortec was the first company to develop and apply this phenomenon.