One of the advantages of working in a biology lab is getting deliveries of stuff in dry ice and getting to play with the dry ice afterwards. Sadly, while dry ice is clearly very cool (a-ha ha ha ha ha (dies)) it makes a lousy way of cooling down your drinks[1]. With a latent heat of sublimation of merely 199kJ/kg, CO2 draws less energy out of the liquid than ice's latent head of melting of 334kJ/kg. That's easily dealt with by using larger blocks of dry ice, but the fundamental problem seems to be that most of the sublimed CO2 boils straight out of the glass and just gently cools the atmosphere instead. Maybe ethanol cubes are the way forward.
[1] Much like Red Stripe, it is also a lousy fabric softner.
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mjg59) wrote,
