Water Cooling System for my Halo 3 suit (WIP)

Ok, this has been a constant labor of love over the last few months and with constantly redesigning things and new parts and changing parts and so on I am finally getting to the point of fruition.

I have wanted, no needed, a water cooling system for my armor for the longest time. And while this build will not be cost acceptable to most around $1000, yep that much, it could probably be modified and cheapened possibly.

This is after all a prototype, and I pretty much build on the fly, for everything I do, heh, so hence the constant modifications.

I'm finally at the point of hooking up all the hoses and wiring, so as I go thru that I will post more pics, pleas stay tuned.

Yes I am working on Rubies armor, don't hate, it actually is really good stuff, and currently an overall prototype for me until I build my fully metal suit, which I'll really need this water cooler for.

The basics for this design, is it uses a peltier cooling chip instead of ice packs and thus can run as long as the battery pack can last, if I were to keep the charger cord hooked in and on me, when the battery runs low, I could just stand at an outlet and recharge in an hour or two. The peltier is part of a closed loop heat exchanger of my design, just cobbled together from various parts, all purchase-able on amazon, which is my main place of ordering stuff, also McMaster Carr is another place for good stuff I use. There is a water reservoir (3d printed bottle), water pump, and garage door opener control box. Everything runs on 12v.

Also the water cooling vest I plan on using is from Veskimo.

Heat Exchanger Stage 1



The blue block is an aluminum radiator block, water flows thru this.
The grey center piece is an aluminum heat sink, slightly modified.
The peltier chip is sandwiched between the block and heat sink.
Two fans are attached to the heat sink so as to push and pull the air across it as fast as possible.

Heat Exchanger Stage 2



Parts wrapped in adhesive foam and starting the plenum enclosure.

Heat Exchanger Stage 3



End view of fully enclosed unit.

Heat Exchanger Stage 3 (side view)




Back armor prepping.



The nice thing about using the rubies suit is that it's plastic and thermo formable. So when I need to make a change, or help make something fit better, I just heat it up and then with gloves mold the plastic new.
Here I flattened out the bottom ridges and made more room there for the battery pack to fit. Under my thumb is the water reservoir, black tape covers back leds.
All armor edging has been reinforce with glued on nylon strapping, and where cracks got to be too bad, I used hvac hanger strapping and rivets, rivets for everything!


Water reservoir and Pump



Here I have the water pump installed. Pretty much everything I install is with either straps and rivets or super industrial adhesive Velcro.


Heat exchanger installed



Here the heat exchanger is fully installed and plenum'd in place.


And currently with the battery pack and everything installed, minus wiring and hoses.



I'll post more pics and some video when I get time, but I can't wait to finally get this finished and testing it at cons!!!!

I'll have to weigh what the whole back weighs now though, but that battery is like 10 lbs I think.


What do you guys think?

wow thats a pretty great idea good work!

Thanks man, yeah it's definitely a labor of love, i'm really hoping it's going to work. I finally got the wiring all done and all the hoses done, so now I just need a time to put it all on and give it a good couple hour test.

Yeah that looks like it would be heavy...but awesome to have. I'm certainly interested in your results.

Exemplary ideas there...
Certainly fantastic for a 3-day con. I've only just started my armour build... haven't though once about cooling! :wacko
Can't wait to see more: opcorn

Yeah that looks like it would be heavy too, not sure I could wear it for 3-4 hours at a time but I do like the idea. Ill be watching this thread cause I think you may be on to something!

Ive been thinking of the same for my suit as its based on a wetsuit base. ( its wet/cold here in portland OR) .;
Have you looked in to doing full PID for the TEC chip and pump??
. It may help with power draw and give more stable temps.

a PICAXE would be easy to implement .

when I had my knee surgerys . I used a TEC based cool wrap and pump. Oh man I wish I could have kept it for cooling my diode lasers and for cosplay.

one thing you could do is add a extra loop and some 2 way shut off quick disconnects . Use a larger system while not on the con floor .
In your room you can plug in that larger heat exchanger and really drop some temps..

CPC makes them from mcMaster .

Thanks for all the ideas guys.

As for an update, it's two fold in good bad.

The good is, with intermittent use of the cooling unit and pump, but mostly the pump on all the time, the battery lasted almost 7 hours!

The bad is a two part-er, the back of the armor really needs to be made to have the battery pack fitted inside it more, it put a lot of strain on my shoulders and made the front armor dig into my upper pecks badly, which took me almost 4 days to recover from. Having fibromyalgia makes it tough for me to do strenuous activities for very long, let alone wear armor fore hours at a time, so this really took me out. I've made some mods to the under suit to compensate cushion wise, but I really need to mod the armor more. (any ideas on better shoulder cushions would be greatly appreciated though. )

Unfortunately, either the peltier is not strong enough, or I would need more of them to cover the aluminum radiator block, either way the power pack as is wouldn't support that. While it did make difference in water temp, it was very minimal, so once I realized that I kept the cooler off and the pump did provide some added relief the rest of the time.

Now with that being said, and talking to a couple companies that make specialized thermal coolers, I'm going to go with a 3 fan full radiator for the left shoulder, and for-go the cooling chip. They were pretty sure that this will make a much better difference in cooling for body warmth water. This path will require much modding of the back armor to make it fit and I will loose some of the current aesthetics, but I'll try to make it look good, heh.

I'll post pics once I get the new parts and start the install.

Great look! I think the thing most people neglect is that it gets extremely hot

Thanks!

Yes, the additional issue is, the more weight you add, the harder your body works and thus the more heat it generates, so there will come a point to where you basically can only design the system to work so well, unless I can find some kind of water chiller that's small enough to fit in the back, that is another avenue I'm exploring.

Try expanding the outer back outwards. if thats possible, to add a compartment that blends in.

Mjolnir said:

Try expanding the outer back outwards. if thats possible, to add a compartment that blends in.

Click to expand...

I'm going to see what I can do with my heat gun and see if I can get things to mold outward without to much major deformation. Wish me luck.