Why do you want to heat up or cool down a cat?
When kitty has been outside all day in the rain, you don’t want him dripping water all over your nice carpet… but if you could turn that water into ice or steam, it wouldn’t drip!
Now, the real trick would be heating or cooling the water outside the cat, without heating or cooling the water inside the cat.
[brief hijack]
JS, I was always under the impression, from my unenlightened days as a chemist, that liquid nitrogen itself is in fact pretty darn cheap. It’s just the storage and transportation expenses that get you. Am I out of my mind?
[/brief hijack]
I believe the real question is “Why wouldn’t you want to?!”
But all joking aside, the point I was trying to make was if it would be possible to cool down living AND not living items. I was also playing off the numerous tall tales & UL’s out there about sticking your pet in the nuke. Let’s just call our tragic kitty Shrödinger…
-kev
why dont you just reverse the polarity?
Liquid Nitrogen is such a bummer. You have to deal with huge vats of dangerously cold liquids, large insulated containers, and what happens when you run out of LN? Do you have a delivery service pump more LN into your containment unit. Also, what happens when my toddler (or cat) gets too curious and dives right it? Catcicles!
No, I want a fairly cheap, light weight, electronic device which i can dial in how cold I want something to get.
g8rguy, you’re right. The actual production of liquid nitrogen today is pretty cheap as it is done on a large scale and the stuff it’s made from is, well, pretty much free. It is the storange and delivery that’ll do you in. Plus there are various regulations governing storage and proper handling. Who wants the hassle?
OTOH, today almost everybody has a methane pipe into their house. This is also a pretty dangerous compound to have around, but it’s proved itself exceedingly useful. I imagine if the demand was out there for quick, ready made ice cubes we’d have little nozzles (up high where the kiddies couldn’t reach) where we could pour out liquid nitrogen and get some nice cool snack. There are probably uses for the stuff I’m not even beginning to think about right now. I imagine if it could be done cheaply enough, you could run a wicked freezer and refrigerator off the stuff without having to worry about pesky blackouts. We might think of airconditioning possibilities too.
Depending on how high we keep the pressure in the distribution system, we could have some problems with people getting cold-scalded upon breaking a line. But this is only slightly more dangerous than natural gas breaks, and would only effect the immediate nearby environment unlike the huge explosions and fires that result from methane leaks. Besides, nitrogen itself is a much more innocuous thing to release into the environment than natural gas (which is an attributed green-house gas).
Hmm, we could really be onto something here. The only problem is installing miles and miles of insulated pipes that can withstand the cold. But they’re already talking about having to cool superconducting cables (if they ever get around to figuring it out) to liquid nitrogen-like temperatures, so it’s not totally left field. Not to mention the problem of getting enough pressure to get the stuff to flow well through the system (can you get a large-scale pumping system that works well at those temperatures?). These are engineering problems, though, should be surmountable.
So now all we’ve got to do is start convincing people they want liquid nitrogen pumped into their house and we’ve got ourself a whole other utility company model! I hereby declare everyone in this thread ideological founders of the Liquid Nitrogen Company and they get first dibs when the stock goes public.
I’m in! where do I sign? BTW, you could kill two birds with one stone by cooling those SC cables with the very LN lines that are pumping into your homes.
Could your AC and Refrigerator/Freezer all be run off the stuff. Or am I crazy? …Don’t answer that…
Cool! And as long as we’re thinking of possible uses of liquid nitrogen… we (well, one of the professors, anyway) used to make ice cream with it back at college… Hmm… you have an idea there!
You could also use you Liquid Nitrogen line to cool your supercomputers and NMR machines. (I guess those aren’t exactly the most practical of uses, though.) Ice cream: now that’s a sellable idea!
Or even better: Cooling down stuff that you accidentally overheated in the microwave! And then, if you got it too cold, you could just pop it into the microwave and heat it back up again! Clever, huh?