Written by: web365 on June 14, 2022

In 1928, a French physics student, George Ranque, was experimenting with a vortex-type pump he had developed when he noticed warm air exhausting from one end and cold air from the other. He soon forgot about the pump he had developed and started a small firm to exploit the commercial potential for this strange device that produced hot and cold air with no moving parts. However, the business soon failed, and the Vortex tube slipped into obscurity until 1945 when a German physicist, Rudolph Hilsch, published a widely read scientific paper on the device.

Previously, the great nineteenth century physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, hypothesised that since heat involves the movement of molecules, we might someday be able to get hot and cold air from the same device with the help of a “friendly little demon” that would sort out and separate the hot and cold molecules of air.

Consequently, the Vortex Tube has been variously known as the “Ranque Vortex Tube”, the “Hilsch Tube”, the “Ranque-Hilsch Tube”, and “Maxwell’s Demon”. By any name, in recent years it has gained acceptance as a simple, reliable and low-cost solution to a wide variety of industrial spot cooling problems.