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Article: Heat-pipe furnaces.
- Article from:
- Popular Science
- Article date:
- February 1, 1984
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1984 Bonnier Corporation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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They move heat from place to place aboard spacecraft; they recover waste heat in industrial plants; and they cool delicate electronic equipment. Some 100,000 of them are sunk deep into the permaforst beneath the Alaska pipeline to keep the soil frozen despite the heat from the flowing oil [PS, June '74]. Now Borg-Warner has introduced a gas furnace that uses a bank of them as its heat exchanger.
"They" are heat pipes--those superbly efficient heat-transfer devices that have no moving parts, require no external power, and transfer 1,000 times as much heat as solid-copper rods of equal size.
Yet despite its high-technology heat exchanger, Borg-Warner's ...