Ideally, for the best removal of heat by an evaporating liquid we need one with a high latent heat of evaporation (so that each gram evaporated removes a lot of heat) and a low boiling temperature (so that it boils easily when we apply our vacuum and therefore removes heat rapidly). However, maybe methanol looks promising. It's got a reasonably low boiling temperature and quite a high latent heat. We knew that you can make methanol and acetone from the destructive distillation of wood. So that's what we did.

Once we had the mixture of methanol/acetone we tried to evaporate it, under vacuum, in the presence of water, to try and cool the water to ice.

The methanol/acetone mixture evaporates taking heat from the water, which is enclosed inside an insulating container with lid.

How did methanol work? 

Major funding for Rough Science was provided by the National Science Foundation. Corporate funding was provided by Subaru.

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