Well yes, I suppose it would work but where are you going to plug your fan in?
Seriously, lets put in some numbers. A kilogram of dry ice has 5.9x10
5Joules of cooling power. A standard person puts out 100 to 150 Watts of power. Over an 8 hour period that is of the order of 3x10
6Joules or about 5 times that of the cooling power of a kilo of dry ice. Furthermore the tent probably leaks heat like a sieve. How much cooling power goes to you compared to how much leaks out of the tent is a huge unknown. In sum, I don't think it's worth it.
LeeH
Here's another twist. Let's say that you managed to get that tent really leak-free. Let's say you have 5kg of CO
2. That's about 100 moles. The tent probably has a volume of about 10 m
3. That holds around 500 moles of air. In a leak-free tent, that would make the atmosphere abut 20% CO
2. Although it's not usually a very toxic gas, at those levels it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide. I'm not saying it's all that dangerous, just that this is a reminder that the tent will be quite leaky, and it doesn't seem practical to cool it this way. Mike W.
(published on 07/16/2011)
