General Watercooling question- help!
 

I was pondering the impact of the tubing material on system flow rates and I came to the realization that I have no idea whats really going on.

In sum, my question is - are the collisions of the water molecules with the tubing walls elastic or inelastic (assume clearflex or tygon) ? And (part 2) what effect would changing the tubing (cheaper stuff, going all copper piping, etc) have on it?


If the collisions are inelastic (and I assume that they are) then the amount of tubing (actual length used) results in lower flow rates / increased resistance simply because a portion of the energy is being used to press against the tubing.

Has anyone tried doing actual testing to determine whats what? I'd imagine that running a closed loop system with 10' of tubing and a flow meter and then comparing that with 100' would give some fairly solid data. I just don't have 100' of tubing. :cry:

I'm thinking that switching to copper tubing would decrease the resistance and yield a better performing product. I might try out a few of those to see.

Does anyone have a inexpensive flow meter that they can recommend getting?

It's inelastic - you definitely increase the head requirement of a system with tubing runs - this is why people say to keep tubing short. If you're after lower friction tubing you might want to look into Tygon's teflon lined tubing - not only is teflon very low friction, it's almost completely chemically inert so you don't have to worry about additives eating your tubing.

Ah, but the real quesiton is how inelastic? Is there a datasheet out there? It'd be alot easier to make a simulation to estimate performance (not my goal just how I think) if we had real numbers.

bump......

You might want to lookup Newtonian fluids versus non-Newtonian fluids: the latter is elastic.

Water is a Newtonian fluid.

Don't get me wrong, or anything but, on average a person is gonna use how much tubing? 10 feet max? You go ahead an do a test based on 10 feet of vinyl tubing compared to 10 feet of tygon and 10 feet of Clearflex and I guarantee you the flow differences would be none to miniscule. 9 out of 10 people will choose clearflex over tygon because of the price difference. 1 out of 5 people will choose tygon over clearflex because of a little bit more of a bend.

I recently did a thread on what tubing people use. I myself switched from vinyl to clearflex. To me, It's the best thing next to sliced bread. I got 12 feet of 1/2" clearflex 60 for $4.08 and will never go back to vinyl. I got 20 feet of vinyl for $15.00 and it was a big waste of money.