liquid cooling liquid
 

over time will the water rust the radiator, and why doesnt anyone use antifreeze instead of water. It is a cool floresent color and prevents rust. or would that not work.

also will the hoses get dry, and crack over time from heat exposure.

just asking ..

Re: liquid cooling liquid
 

Again, will get more attention in the liquid cooling forum!

8-ball

The reason is, though, that antifreeze has much, much worse heat transfer properties than water, so since people primarily watercool to get heat away from the CPU more effectively, antifreeze does not make much sense.

Most water-cooled PCs don't use automotive antifreeze (ethylene glycol) because both the thermal conductivity and specific heat of antifreeze are not as good as water and the viscosity is much higher, which means more resistance to flow.

Now a lot of people do use 15% to 20% antifreeze in water mix for its anticorrosion properties, particularly in systems with aluminum (or anodized aluminum) parts.

Re: liquid cooling liquid
 

This is my first post on this forum... wohoo :)

The water does not rust the radiator, the radiator is made of either aluminum or copper and neither of those two materials rust. They do corrode, but the water has no effect on that (right?).

The hoses will not dry and crack, cause there really isn't that much heat inside the hoses. Maybe 20-25 degrees C (70-80 degrees F).

Re: Re: liquid cooling liquid
 

Welcome to ProCooling!

Most metals rust, when exposed to oxygen (water), but many behave differently. Aluminium will actually protect itself (to a certain extent) with the oxidized coating, while Iron will continually rust.

Having different metals exposed to the same liquid actually accelerates the rusting process.

Hoses do dry up, but we're far from seeing one dry up to the point where it will crack, for the reason you mentionned.


Otherwise, anti-freeze makes a lot of sense, if you're trying to prevent your coolant from freezing (i.e. chiller) :D . #Rotor uses it, and has been able to keep his loop clean for up to 3 1/2 years.

Without a chiller, all one really needs is an anti corrosion agent. The anti-freeze solutions do contain some of those agents, but it's quite overkill to use one in a normally cooled PC, IMO.

Using an anti-corrosion agent is optional, unless you have highly opposed metals in the loop, i.e. Aluminium and copper. Reference: galvanic chart. Brass and copper are very close to each other.

Then there's algae...

H20/o2 has a standard cell potitial higher then all metals except gold and platnum. If any other metal is exposed to water it will eventually be completely dissolved.

However for our purposes this reaction occurs so slowly at room temperature in pure water that its not important. Adding a corrosion inhibitor further slows this process down.

If you add another metal, then entirely new reactions become possible, many of which can occur quite rapidly. Thats why we don't mix metals.