I always said, that I do never make a PC with water cooling. Water and computers do not go together.

But I changed my opinion on this one. Luckily, because now it works beautifully.

I designed the following cooler.

- A heat pickup system

- A transport system to the cooler

- The cooler itself with a pump, a pot of buffer cooling fluid, and a heat exchange with the outside world.

 

Picking up heat.

I wanted to leave my construction with the copper plate and alu cool block intact. And simply add the water cooling system to it.

I have chosen for the following construction.

I placed a cooling sandwich between the copper plate and the alu cooling block. The connecting surfaces should be very flat and connected to each other with conducting fluid/pasta. Use the best you can get. I used the stuff you can get in the computer store, but there is better stuff out there.

The cooling sandwich is made of two copper (I used messing by the way) plates of three millimeter. I soldered two water circuits on one plate (flame,....dirty work) using copper flexible pipe of 9 millimeter thick with internal diameter of 6 mm. The problem is that you can not make a sharp turn with this copper pipe. So I made straight pipes, and later on soldered square connection tubes on the messing plate to connect the pipes. So, ending up with two circuits of 10 pipes, which are interconnected. I bought some two component heat conducting glue and pasted the whole surface straight. After that I made the surface as flat as possible and glued the second messing plate on it with the same glue. After hardening, I made everything clean and smooth with sand paper.

The result is a very solid, heavy cooling block of about one 1.3 cm thick, with two input pipes and two output pipes. Why two ? Well, to get more easily the cooling fluid around.

This cooling unit is exactly the measures of the copper 1 cm cooling block in the PA. So it can be easily put between the copper and the alu cooling parts.

The water is transported between PA and cooler with cheap internal diameter pipe of 6mm.

For the pump I got one from a fellow radio amateur (Thanks PA0CCX, Hans). It was a beefy pump, 12 V, 600mA. And it pumps enough water to cool my PA (I know now,....). I bought a radiator with three 12cm2 fans of 160 mA (appr 100 euro,...oeps,....) and used a jam pot as water buffer pot. Glue a copper plate on the pot cover, drill two holes and solder two 6mm pipes in it. Here you have you pot for nearly nothing,...

To measure the in and out temperature I went again to mr Ali,.....1,45 euro for a temp meter with digital read out. It works 100%. 

After putting everything together, it was time to measure. I borrowed the iron of my wife and put the unit on the cooling sandwich. 230V on it and after a while it did 1750 Watts with a duty cycle of  60% off/on. So my cooler was pumping away about a kilowatt of power away. 

More than enough for my PA.

I had to change the PA box a little to get the cooling unit between the copper plate and the alu cooler. But it fitted ok. So now I have the water cooler and the fans in place,......I am very happy with the result ! Temperature of the feeler close to the FETs shows never more than 45 degrees, also after continuous cq (CW).