When I was reading Tony Tether's interview on the cool glove, I could not shake the thought that it is connected to several areas of interest I have. In this Stanford paper, it is shown that cooling through the palms of your hand is really important for most physical exhaustive activity as well as for people who suffer from MS. The principle is that palms are the main radiators for the body.
What Heller and Grahn were seeing was the return trip: when externally applied heat shocked open the radiators in the cold palms of anesthesia patients, warmed blood was returned straight to the heart, and the body was reheated from the inside out. Applying a mild vacuum to the hand intensified this effect.
But this part of the entry stuck me
Grahn’s latest homemade version features soft vinyl against the hand instead of metal. One design challenge is obvious—how to create a vacuum-bearing glove flexible enough so that its wearers can use their hands, not just sit cooling their palms.
what he is describing is an element of an reversed advanced spacesuit.
This quote
Heller and Grahn have found in the lab that the temperature under which the radiators shut down in humans is highly individual.
strucks me as requiring some type of system to evaluate the radiator capacity for every potential customer. The RTX device using this concept is currently made by Avacore.
While reading this, I could not shake the fact that it was doing the reverse of the heat pipe glove and wonder how Bejan's work can be used to figure out an optimal cooling/heating solution that does not require a compressor.
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