Brief History of the Cabinet Cooler

Design:
The Compact Cabinet Cooler was designed in 1981 to cool sealed electronic enclosures. Air conditioners were the only enclosure coolers available commercially at that time.The cabinet cooler was designed to eliminate several negative features of air conditioners: size and weight; high energy use; costly maintenance; short life (20,000 hours); interior condensation.

The useful life design requirement for the Cabinet Cooler was set at 50 years. The two major components that would determine this were identified as the Cabinet Cooler core and the fans.

Cabinet Cooler Core:
The core material selected for use in the Noren Compact Cabinet Cooler was copper tubing and aluminum fins. This combination of materials was readily available and had been in use for many decades in refrigeration coils, steam heating coils, radiators, etc. Under normal conditions these materials do not corrode and would easily exceed the 50-year life specification. This combination of materials had an additional attraction, Noren Products had already been manufacturing copper heat pipes for over ten years. Thousands of hours of research and life testing had begun during the 1960s and had already been done on this type of heat pipe. The accelerated life tests had shown that a properly manufactured copper heat pipe of the design would last over 100 years.

Fans:
The fans were designed to be an easily changed replacement part. The tubeaxial fans selected as the standard fans for Compact Cabinet Coolers have an operating life of 10 to 12 years. After about 5 years the bearings begin to wear and the fans start to get noisy. The operating temperature limits for the fans are -40°F to +160°F.

Rated life:
In our literature Compact Cabinet Coolers are rated for 30-year life. Marketing surveys indicated that the actual 50-year rating was hard for customers to accept. A rating of 30 years was determined to be more understandable, still many times the life of an air conditioner. Heat pipes are rated for 100 years.