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Originally Posted by Cathar
Been playing in a small way with copper sulphate pentahydate as a cooling liquid solution.
In particular relation to the thermal properties of the substance, it has 4x the thermal conductivity of water. Have been trying to dig up some information on its kinematic viscosity, but am not having much luck. If it's as viscous as water is, or even if it's 5x more viscous, it's still a better solution to use than pure water in pure convectional liquid sense.
Eats away at nickel though pretty savagely. Seems to have no affect on 316 stainless steel. It's unreactive with copper and silver. Slight reaction with brass. Unreactive with most plastics.
Anyone got anything more to contribute. It has about 1/3rd the thermal capacity of water per volume, but any flow rate above 4LPM effectively negates that as a significant issue.
pH is between 3-3.8 depending on the concentration of its dilution.
Anyone else want to contribute?
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You shouldn't need any algicide in the loop using it. Copper sulafte pentahydrate mixed with water is sprayed on farm ponds to kill algae.
As far as water wetter, there are plenty of surfactants out there that work in acids so keeping the ph down below 5 while using a wetter should be easy. I used to work in a chemical plant where we made the solutions used to silver plate and copper plate glass for mirrors and worked with copper sulfate pentahydrate every day. You might want to check into the chemical resistance of your pump and tubing before you try it. For a mirror line we used polyethylene tubing and pretty expensive diaphragm pumps designed specifically for chemicals (but our solutions were very concentrated also, ph of1-1.5 on the acid solutions, a ph of 13-14 on the base solutions).
You could look into the thermal properties of silver nitrate solutions also, but since it's photoreactive it's pretty nasty to work with. I had thought about chemically silver plating waterblocks for looks since it's pretty easy to do versus electroplating ( I silver-plated a dragonfly once when I worked there). I doubt it would be of any thermal benefit but it looks nice.