Thread: Cooling schemes and Heat Absorbing Materials for Rapid Cooling of Tanks

​I have a Cylindrical Tank made of Stainless Steel of Diameter=1m and Height=1m.
It has been heated to ~90 degree Celsius after Steam Sanitization.

It takes usually 2 hours to cool down and come to room temperature. My aim is to reduce the cooling time significantly and have thought of following possible solutions.
1. Using a heat absorbing material, which can be wrapped around the vessel like a blanket.
2. using water on the outer surface for rapid cooling( might cause thermal stress though !!)

I want to know what are the cheap and efficient methods available for this.

Thanks in advance

How about dumping some dry ice into the tank?

Nothing should go inside the tank as it might affect the quality after sanitization.
If something has to come in direct contact it will be preferred to be on the outside surface.

I once saw a disassembled car engine-block (at a workshop during a car repair)... an engine-block has a curious configuration: 4 (or a number of) cylinder is submerged/surrounded by a water jacket (the space between metal wall is filled with water. eg: the bulk of space in regular engine is just for filling water!), and this water cycled thru radiator to expel heat. My point is: why can't your tank do the same? your tank is just 90-degree Celcius, way cooler than (possibly) 1000 degree Celcius car engine, you can do like a car engine.

Nice Observation, If I am getting it right then you mean to have a jacketed tank, which can be cooled with water.

Your idea is really good, but the only concern it will take a lot of time to change the design of existing tanks and not feasible at the moment. This can be implemented for newly manufactured tanks easily.


What I am looking for is a solution which doesn`t require much change in the design.

Solution with least utility consumption will be good economically as well.

garden hose

:O ...
funhere, if you don't want to hose the tank with water you can also wrap the tank with garden hose and run cool water thru it.

autoclave
i read about a sculpture who used cast acrylics and had to control the temperature in his casting tank
the trick was controling the temperature and pressure----the stuff becomes exothermal so you have to set upper and lower limits, and pressure hepls
maybe looking into the extant technology there may help

Hello funhere,

if you wish to wrap then I sugest you do so with a sponge material, and a drip tray under the tank to catch and recycle the cooling water. Cooling rate is controlled by volume of water intruduced at the top of the sponge. Once a sponge is inpregnated water passes through it.

Cheers Peter

The problem is unusual because the tank walls should not be cooled during steam sanitization. Perhaps you could coil aluminum tubing around it, leaving the tube empty most of the time. When you pump cold water through it, the tubing will shrink and tighten around the tank in a good way.

Hello funhere,

You mention the need to sanitize. Currently you do this with Steam. Sanitization also occurs in CO2 application. A squirt of CO2 can acheive two solution. One of sanitization. One of cooling.

Cheers Peter