The Mad Innovator

Never give up! Talking to a co-worker about the wet cooling hat, he also recognized the potential and mentioned that they had cooled a wine-bottle with a wet towel in a boat during the summer. As the water had evaporated, the wine had chilled down. He thought it might be due to the fact that it was placed in the sun and that would remove more energy from the bottle.

Below is an example of a ceramic wine chiller, you put water in the chiller and place the bottle inside. As water passes through the ceramic, it will evaporate on the outside of the ceramic and thus cool it down as energy is taken from the chiller to the steam as the humidity will try to even out.


Here is another example of a ceramic wine chiller were the potter has not the physical insight and thus has decorated the chiller with glazing . Glaze is water tight and the chiller can not "sweat", thus it doesn't really work as intended...


Back to the hat, the cooling of a wine bottle from evaporation is not that effective since these kind of glazed wine chiller products exists and nobody seems to care.

How can we improve it?

If we blow on something it turns cold. Moving air over a hot body cools it down. So, maybe the cap needs to be blown on.
What can google dig up? Let's see... a patent?! Ohh, I'm not the first to have a go at this ;-)

Here's a link to the patent Hat with a fan
It's quite facinating to read about the improvements over other inventions in the area of hats with fans, and how the below hat is much better.


This is acutally worth testing I think... I'll try to email the innovator too see if this is in production and what his opinions are! I'll be back...

Since I didn't have time to publish the complete experiment with the cooling hat, but left off midway, I actually got a comment asking for the final results.
Sorry about that, but my lack of time eventually leads to another great invention, "the blogging cliff-hanger".

The cliff hanger seems to have been invented by the princess in a 1001 nights according to Wikipedia
If I remember correctly Arthur Conan Doyle, published Sherlock Holmes as a cliffhanger as well. So nothing new under the sun, it just comes in a differernt shape.

Measuring the temperature in the cap, 27.5 degrees Celcisus with a surrounding temperature of 25.4 degrees.


During the measurement period I measured the temperature, it went down a little (like 0.1 degree) but I would contribute this to the fact that I was resting, once I got up and moved around and measured it again there were no difference.

Final test results, 36.7 degrees temperature in my ear after 97 minutes.


Other things I noted during the experiment was that at first it felt nice, (despite the dripping) it felt like the cold water on my head cooled me down a bit. This was not measurable with the ear thermometer, so it might just be a pleaseant feeling from the nerves in the skin.

Since all the water went down, the top of the cap got dry. It might have insulated my head and prevented heat from leaving...


Conclusions: The great idea is not really working, it really crashed and burned. There is no proof of a colder head and everything gets wet.

I'm now going to build me a cooling hat!

First I dug through the drawers and found this cap, usually used for the exact opposite purpose, that is keeping me warm...


This is my body temperature before the experiment, between 37.0 and 37.2 degrees Celcius.


Water temperatue is 21 degrees Celcius, and room temperature is 24.8 degrees.


I soaked the cap in water, squeezed it so it contained two deciliters of water and put it on!


Then I sat down, turned on the TV and there was the Simpsons! Perfect!



First problem,not a major disaster but not something I had thought about. Gravity. Something that has been around since 1687. When you put on a wet cap, the water will move down from the top of the cap down to the bottom.


When to much water reaches the bottom of the cap, the cap starts dripping. First on my camera when I tilted my head forward trying to look at the camera display, and later when watching the Simpsons and resting my head on the black leather armchair it dripped down my neck and onto the armchair...


Three possible lessons learned:

1. Too much water drips on everything.
   
2. Keep the cap absolutely horizontal or it will drip faster in the lowest "corner".
   

From a technical magazine "Allt om Vetenskap"I found a short notice that researchers in Sweden are evaluating cooling vests to help tired people suffering from MS. Apperantly they get tired when in a warm place and this really helps them in several ways, not just curing tiredness. The nervecells seems to communicate faster when cold!

This is just great! I need to think faster and better!!!

Googling for it, this turned up - a link to the company that sells these vests here in Sweden: Nordic BTR

It has an active water flow that regulates the temperature, so really cool!

Ok, this might be the soloution to my problems, but I can't see me hooked up to a powersupply wearing this all day.... Time for improvement, experimtenting and fun!

Me on a horse - so rare someone actually took my photo!

Well, I need to post something to be able to try out the advertising stuff.....