New tech can cool room temperature drinks to icy cold in just 45 seconds

When it comes to cooling drinks, everybody’s got a trick

 

 

 

Some are outright silly — I once had a friend tell me that a beer will cool faster if placed in the fridge upside down — but work quite well. Try wrapping your drinks in a damp paper towel before cooling, next time you’re absolutely itching for a cold drink. And if the urgency is simply too great, one particularly quick method involves unloading a fire extinguisher into a cooler full of drinks — though the cost effectiveness of this option is questionable.

 

Quickly cooling drinks on the cheap has been an elusive goal for countless years; the microwave offered expedited heating, so how far away are we be from a similar acceleration of cooling? It’s turned out to be much more difficult to remove energy from an object than to add it, however, and a reverse microwave was been quite some time in coming.

 It may be here now, though: Rapidcool is a collaboration between European industry and academic partners, and claims to be able to bring a drink from room temperature to the all-important 4 degrees Celsius in just 45 seconds. It can supposedly take multiple cans or even wine bottles, and uses dramatically less energy than its competitors.

 

The actual cooling technology is known as V-Tex, and uses an interesting combination of innovations. The super-cooling of the can’s exterior is efficient but not a new idea — but by agitation of the can they avoid the flash-freezing on the outside that leads to slushy drinks. As V-Tex points out on its website, such slushing is “unacceptable to consumers.”

 

However, it’s equally unacceptable to get blasted in the face by a stream of carbonated beverage. By agitating the can, the technology ought to send the can into a countdown to explosion, but it makes use of a physical phenomenon known as the Rankine vortex. By creating a Rankine vortex, the company claims they can shake carbonated drinks quite violently without ill effect.

 

There are countless possible applications for the technology, with the ultimate goal being a consumer solution in household kitchens. For now, however, it seems the technology will see its first wide-scale roll-out in the form of vending machines. Cooling drinks as they are purchased could dramatically reduce both their costs and vending machine power use