this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A watercooled computer still uses air-cooling in the end. The difference is how the heat is collected and where it is dissipated.
I don't know that much how the human body cooling system work, but the lungs could be considered as the radiator (as would the skin be).
Yeah, but my point was that its a fundamentally different kind of heat transfer.
Its the difference between how an oven cools itself and how a power plant cools its self. With an oven, you vent the hot gas that is created through elsewhere, moving the gas and the heat away from its source. That gas (fluid) isn't re-used. In a radiator, the fluid is re-used in the cooling loop.
A car or a power plant or the human ears are that second example. We're heating a fluid (blood, radiator fluid, water, etc), to transfer heat to secondary fluid (air, more water, etc..). With a power plant, you have fluids in a circuit, transferring heat from one to the other. The primary cooling fluid doesn't leave the circuit.
In the first example, we're ejecting the hot gasses directly, and not re-using them as a fluid. This is more like a car exaust, or an oven, or human breathing.
Its in-out cooling versus around-and-around cooling. Humans (afaik) are primarily cooled through in-out cooling. We do radiative heat transfer and have organs adapted for that specifically, but its a very small amount of heat transfer compared to what we get from in-out cooling.
A car also has both radiative and in-out cooling. But it gets far more of its cooling from its radiator than it does through ejecting hot gasses.
Human cooling is mostly us throwing away hot gas, and we don't reuse it. We get some cooling through our blood, but less than what we get through breathing.