Thermal battery

Promethean Power has developed a novel energy storage system that uses a cold liquid to rapidly chill milk even when there's no power from the grid available. The company's first three cold storage systems will be deployed in India this year at processing centers. By having these types of systems, milk collection points can take milk from small farmers for longer hours, thereby giving them more opportunity to earn money. Seen here is a test system using water at Promethean Power's South Boston workspace at Greentown Labs, a clean-tech incubator. The warm milk, brought directly after milking, is poured over the cylinder-shaped tank and quickly brings milk to 4 degrees Celsius. See related story: A 'thermal battery' for villages in India.

January 29, 2012 4:00 AM PST

Photo by: Martin LaMonica/CNET

| Caption by: Martin LaMonica

[ruckover]

I'd be more interested in the beer project of this project.
I am a home brewer and have a cylindrical fermenter similar as seen in this photo, its 12.5 gallons. To cool the fermenter in the summer with out a dedicated fridge or building a cold room out of foam board and run a portable AC unit in it is rather hard, In the Summer months I some times switch to using glass carboys (the old office water cooler bottles in glass, and use the old wet t-shirt method, place carboy in a tub of water with frozen milk jugs floating in the water and wrap top area with a old t-shirt with some part of t-shirt touching the water, it wicks the water into t-shirt and through evaporation lowers the temps in fermenter, add a fan blowing on t-shirt and you get more cooling. But its not the most precise method.
I have thought about using wraps of Stainless Steel, SS, tubing in placed inside the fermenter hooked up to a Igloo cooler (a homebrewers best friend, especially for mashing the grains.) with water and ice, and pump the water from cooler through the SS tubing to cool the fermenting beer and use a Ranco Digital Temperature Controller to control the pump, cutting off when beer reaches the set temp I am looking for. Again, would love to learn more about this articles method for the brewer they are workign with.

[MyRightEye]

Stop making beer the hard way. Use Coopers kits. [CNET editors' note: URL deleted]

[CuSO4-5H2O]

Although there are probably better/easier methods out there, you could try using Peltier devices to make an accurate, electrically controlled cooler. A Peltier is a simple, DC powered device where one side gets really cold and the other really hot. Probably need several of them to be effective with the volume that you are talking about. You could build something with a reservoir, a pump and use tubing to circulate the chilled fluid around your containers.

[AgentGGG]

The open cylindrical form factor appears worthy of improvement in at least two ways:
1) the surface area is not optimized for cooling or pouring; 2) hygiene and sterility of an open external pouring appears very unlikely in rural India.

[lowenbrau212]

Seems like a novelty idea that people will spend some time on, then realize its not a panacea, and drop it.

Remember the The Play Pump? If you even heard about it. Setting up merry go round type wheels kids play on to pump well water in rural Africa. Only problem is, the kids got bored with the wheels after a week, and the merry go round type wheels were much more difficult for the adults to use instead of standard hand crank pumps, especially for elderly people. And they were going to pay for putting in these merry go round wheel pumps with advertising, in rural poor Africa.