In order to better understand where our possible losses were occurring we needed a thermal imaging camera. The local Rexburg Police Department was kind enough come take some pictures for us with their camera. Interestingly enough our loss are occurring in areas in which we would have never guessed!
Although it may be too late in the game to make any changes to correct these areas it has been very helpful to understand how and where we can improve on our design.
Image 1: This is a front view of the Igloo cooler with the lid shut. The bright points are "hot" points on the picture (relatively speaking). The dark areas or the cold points. We had the lid cracked just a bit as to allow the dry ice the ability to escape without popping our lid off. For that reason you can see the area around the lid is almost black. Also, the bright spots towards the top of the lid are simply hand prints from people opening it up. The point of interest in this image is the dark square on top of the lid. In the original cooler that is a simple access lid which allows you to open up a smaller lid grab your soda pop out of whatever instead of having to open up the entire lid. Well, that access point happens to be hollow plastic! We have sealed in the back side of that lid with foam but the lid itself remains hollow. You can see the impact that the lack of internal insulation has on the actual heat transfer through the lid.
Thermal Image 2: This is a side shot showing the fan, 2 hot air exhaust ports, and discharge spout. From this angle you can again see the dark square on the lid. You can also see the hot air exhaust ports are bright white. The fan appears the same probably because the heat sync sits right behind the fan. We're actually seeing the heat sync rather than the fan. The most interesting item in this shot is the discharge plug underneath the fan (It is hard to see in this image). The discharge plug is almost black! Similarly to the small access point on the lid this plug has been foamed in.
I used hot water and dry ice to fill the chamber with vapor. The hope was that after shutting the lid the vapor would show us if we had any leaks.
If you look hard you can see vapor pouring out of the bottom of the hot air exhaust vent. This is not necessarily a good thing.... haha. This was only happening on one side of the cooler. I am assuming this is due to the fact that we replaced the module on that side. In the process of replacing the module we must not have sealed the foam together as well as we should have. We'll know better next time.
Hayden and I having fun with the dry ice. We couldn't resist but have a little fun with the left over dry ice.
Posts
