Enthusiast proves that you can make a liquid nitrogen cryocooler with readily-available refrigeration components

Liquid nitrogen (LN2) is a substance with a boiling point of -196 degrees Celsius (or -320 degrees Fahrenheit), and typically those who want to use it need to buy it directly or use incredibly specialized equipment to cool regular nitrogen themselves. Recently, though, YouTuber Hyperspace Pirate proved that you can actually cool your own nitrogen into real liquid nitrogen at home, albeit with the help of refrigeration components scavenged from several refrigerators and air conditioning units.

Making Liquid Nitrogen with my Homemade Cryocooler – YouTube

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So, why did Hyperspace Pirate do all of this? For fun, mostly — there is no extreme LN2 overclocking going on here, although we saw a Ryzen 9 9950X get overclocked to a world record-making 6.7 GHz using LN2 earlier this week. 

Instead, Hyperspace Pirate mainly relegated his batches of self-made LN2 to freezing and shattering objects that otherwise do not shatter — like oranges and a salad — as well as a chunk of YBCO (Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide) that functions as a superconductor when cooled with LN2 (see top image). This YBCO was able to levitate a small magnet, but lost superconductivity when the test was repeated with a larger magnet and temperatures got too high.

So, is there an actual value proposition here? If you have the technical expertise and access to lots of air conditioning units and refrigerators you don’t need, maybe. For the sake of this video, Hyperspace Pirate skimmed over making (or teaching viewers to make) their own liquid nitrogen, though indicated that the detailed process would be a topic for later. 

The final cooling system proved capable of producing 130cc of LN2 per hour, at a rough total cost of $1.29 per liter. Compared to the $5 per liter you would need to buy it yourself, that is a fair amount of price savings for those intent on regularly using LN2 for whatever reason. Hyperspace Pirate also says that if the process can be improved as much as he expects, yields could double or more to up to 300cc of LN2 per hour, which would make it an even more interesting proposition.

Overall, though, we doubt many of you are going to be racing to disassemble your refrigerator or air conditioners to make your home LN2 anytime soon. That anyone is capable of pulling it off at all is truly impressive, though, and that they shared an extended video detailing the process only makes it that much better.