Date:         Thu, 11 Aug 94 13:50:21 CDT
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Joel Walker <JWALKER@ua1vm.ua.edu>
Subject:      Re:  Solid State A/C

On Thu, 11 Aug 94 13:31:10 CDT Charles E. Vaughan said:
>of inefficiency.  I'm all for it but a lot of engineering is needed; it is
>not a "bolt-on" of an existing technology.

does anyone else remember a system that was developed in the mid-early-70's
by the name of Rovox? it was an air-only cooing system that had great promise
... so naturally, Chrysler (aka Fridgedair) bought up the rights and has
been sitting on it ever since. it was first reported in Popular Science or
Popular Mechanics (and we all know how accurate they are in their conservative
claims of efficiency!).

as i recall, it had a small elliptical chamber with a circular rotor inside.
into the rotor were inserted sliding compressor seals/vanes/whatever that
would follow the shape of the chamber. on the one side of the chamber, the
seals would compress the air (heating the air), which was then passed through
an intercooler (lowering the air temp). the cooled compressed air was then
passed back into the chamber, but on the opposite side ... which allowed it
to expand (really lowering the temp).

one test supposedly dropped the temperature in a 4-door sedan in Daytona
Beach, FL in July from the high 90's to the mid 70's in three minutes.

now ... chrysler claims (as i recall) that they could never get the seals
to last very long. big damn deal. if i had to replace the seals every year,
so what? how much could the little plastic buggers cost? $20? $30? versus
freon and compressors and dryers and hoses and such.

there was one other little problem mentioned. in high humidity environments,
it tended to create a lot of ice on the outside of the hoses, but they
thought that insulation should take care of that. :)

it also took only 1/4 horsepower to run. for something like that, you could
have an electric motor running it, and not pull any power from the engine
at all. and for a big car like our buses, maybe TWO complete systems.

anyway, i'm getting semi-serious about looking up those articles and trying
to see what sort of deal could be done with the idea. if it could be made up
and work, i would think that a vw bus (or any van type vehicle) would be the
perfect vehicle for it. so why haven't they done anything? conspiracy? too
radical a change for the old-ways boys? who knows. maybe it's like cold
fusion, and doesn't work at all. but it sure seemed simple enough to work.

joel