Has anyone ever made a water cooled flashlight before?

It wouldn't be the most efficient idea on power, but you sure could put allot of LED together in a small space and not have to worry about them over heating.

I figured you could build one yourself by buying a copper heatsink, drilling like 8 holes through it, and running a tube that zigzigs through it, and run that to a fishtank pump, and create a separate reservoir for the water. Wouldn't it be cool to make the whole thing out of copper, and even add a few copper heatsinks to the outside of it next to where the water is stored. Maybe you could run the tube outside of the flashlight and through all of the heatsinks on the outside so the water passing through it is at least being cooled to the temperature outside.

If you know of where to do this, or if you know of any lowrider type guys who can do gold plating, you could get it gold plated on the outside when your done, then it would be even better at dissipating heat, hence why they covered the 1 million dollar Mclaren F1's engine and exhaust system in gold.

If you wanted you could just buy a watercooled CPU adapter for $40.99, and then buy a pump for $74.99.

Wouldn't it add some mad bragging rights if you went ahead and added a radiator to it, this thing is starting to sound like a car. It would work enough like one that I would pour some water wetter in to the reservoir since it has even better heat transfer properties than water or antifreeze. As long as your adding a radiator you might as well slap a fan on to it, ya know..

This brings on many more ideas, how great would it be to experiment with over boosting a LED with a liquid cooled heatsink. Maybe you could make your own switch with lots of boost options: normal mode, icewater mode, and who knows maybe dry ice would work, or you could try mercury, ha ha.

I really would love to make a light like this one day, it would have to be see through with clear tubing, so I can add some florescent marker stuff in the water, and install a small blacklight.

I hope I didn't get too carried away with this article, so has anyone ever made a light like the one I'm talking about, or anything even remotely similar? Please post me a link if you know of anything like this.-'

Sincerely,

Chris

Re: Has anyone ever made a water cooled flashlight before?...

...can't say that i have.

but your idea is very imaginative. you might want to consider pursuing an education and career in engineering, or a career as a machinist if that is more to your liking.



oh,...and it probably won't be long before you get a "PAYPAL Sent" emoticon reply to your Post.

Re: Has anyone ever made a water cooled flashlight before?...

Sounds like a good way to incorporate LED headlights or large area lighting, with large fixtures water cooling may be a good idea.

Re: Has anyone ever made a water cooled flashlight before?...

Reading your post it felt like I was back in a popular PC forum that dealt with overclocking and cooling that I frequented a long long time ago; [H]

I don't think we've seen it happen due to the bulk of the whole setup. The pump alone would take up a serious amount of space that people would probably rather like to use for additional battery power.

(take a look at DangerDen and Swiftech for heatsinks of better quality. At least they used to be top of the line 7-8 years ago.)

Someone had that idea a while back.

But divers have been using it for years. Billions of gallons of water around you helps keep your dive light quite cool. I remember seeing one light in the 2000 lumen neighborhood that could only be ran a few minutes unless it was underwater, because it was designed with a water heat sink in mind.

I have 130v bulbs on my micro rov that can't be run out of water more than 30 seconds without burning up. They're in stainless housings, about 1" in diameter and 4" long. Bulbs ranging from 35w to 150w. The housings get hot enough to steam water in about 10 seconds. If I wait til they're in the water they'll run 24 hours straight no problem. If they're hot when we put em in the water they also get condensation inside which shorts out the system. I hate them, but the 150w ones can see about 60ft at 1000ft depth which is nice. I've often times thought of strapping on a g2 when we had light problems. Wonder how far down it'd go without collapsing the o-rings? Hmm. I may have to try that, I have 3 g2's here on board with me. Anybody care to donate a maglite to see how deep itll go? haha. Mine are all over 100 bucks each now, won't risk any of those. I may bring a cheapo one with me next trip. I've sent down my glo-toobs before, they'll go as far down as my rov will. Cool to see the blink blink on the target before I can actually see it with the lights.

g

heh...this was one of my first threads here....and the reply I got basically was "dont waste your time"

though I did have one suggested that using oil may be a more safer approach

hehe...not a flashlight you can EDC but if your inclined to make a mod....start off with one of these
Hose nozzle flashlight @ Lowes (more pics added 4/2)

I have a 6 D cell maglight with a substitute 5 watt luxeon lamp/reflector that I was thinking of water cooling using what I think is a small Piezo water pump. I would wrap and epoxy using thermal epoxy some small diameter copper tubing around the 5 watt luxeon lamp housing and do likewise around the inside of the head or the part of the flashlight the face cap screws onto. Finally I would connect the two copper tubing coils with two lengths of flexible plastic tubing with the pump installed in line in one.

Well how about placing 5 cree behind you metal coffee cup? so you will have warm coffee anytime

Ideally what you would want is very fine copper heat sink with a fan attached to the back to dissipate heat. Either that or a peltier cooler with a heatsink if you don't want moving components.

As for water, you can easily interchange water and copper if you're not planning to transport the heat over a long distance. Water has 10x the heat capacity of copper. On the other hand, copper has 10x the density of water. So technically, for the same volume, either one would absorb the same amount of heat, except copper will do it faster, dissipate it faster, and weigh a helluva lot more.