Homemade liquid nitrogen generator Joule Thomson throttle (2013)

The YouTube channel Hyperspace Pirate[0] has been consistently uploading <i>fantastic</i> videos documenting their attempts to make their own homemade liquid nitrogen machine. They don&#x27;t shy away from including all the technical details, and throw in plenty of hilarious deadpan humor too. Highly recommend them if you&#x27;re interested in this topic.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@HyperspacePirate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@HyperspacePirate</a>

Related:<p><i>Homemade Liquid Nitrogen Generator</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23828316">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23828316</a> - July 2020 (67 comments)

I fabricobbled a liquid nitrogen generator using a cryocooler at home using the same design as Ben at Applied Science [0]. It works very well, I&#x27;ve used it to make liquid nitrogen ice cream many times. It&#x27;s just slow so I run it overnight.<p>Applied Science is fantastic channel if you haven&#x27;t seen it. He&#x27;s also on HN.<p>OP&#x27;s design is much more impressive and hard to build than using a Stirling cryocooler like I did.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7PWESWqhD8s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7PWESWqhD8s</a>

I wonder if in the time since this was written if anyone has found a good source for small turbo expanders.<p>Liquefied air is a potentially interesting mode of energy storage for islanded solar because it doesn&#x27;t require high pressure storage (which has safety concerns)-- for that application the round trip efficiency isn&#x27;t critical as there is nothing else to do with the power... but it can&#x27;t be a total joke. And the basic JT cycle is really poor. I understand that simply adding an expander and another heat exchange stage can improve it a lot.

kids, be sure not to have your cigarette lit whilst separating N2 from air.

I love how he used that to try to freeze his cat!

Are those adds from my&#x2F;our ISP? How does he, someone who seems to write html somewhat poorly, manage to get so many intrusive ads into this post?