EDIT: if only YouTube is blocked... there's a video available here: http://www.v-tex-technology.co.uk/ It mentions nothing about "microwave", and is just a deceptive title on that food blog's part.
In the headline, 'Microwave' stands synecdochally for 'microwave oven' and then also for the more-general category 'fast-heating appliance'.
When there are multiple ways to interpret something, assume the interpretation that credits the writer/speaker with some sense, not an interpretation that is most-literal or most-amenable as the setup for an insult.
With price, you have to consider the energy cost of freezing the ice.
With performance, this thing is less like a microwave and more like a convection oven. A bucket of ice chills the content from outside to the center. This machine creates a spinning vortex inside the beverage container, bringing the warmer center to the outside to be chilled by the surface (by which this machine blows cold water over it).
The idea behind the machine is pretty simple actually. I think this belongs in the clever invention category.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electric_ice_cream_maker.j...
Now people at Whole Foods are going to be scratching their heads as to why the sudden a bunch of geeks are lining up to use the wine chiller no one has touched in the last five years. lol
From the looks of their video, the bottle forms most of the solid body core. The velocity in the rest of the fluid goes as u~1/r and is pure tangential (streamlines are circles around the vortex centre).
This isn't anything special, it's just a pretty regular unforced vortex.
*irrotational here means that the vorticity (defined at a point) is zero, not that the system doesn't look spinny.
Fill a pitcher half full of ice, add cold water to above the ice, and a bunch of salt. Insert bottle, and spin by hand for 30-60 seconds.
This device saves on the cleanup time, in exchange for having another permanent appliance on the counter.
Plus energy grids prefer a gradual and predictable energy draw than a sudden spike. Otherwise we end up with scenarios like this:
So the energy savings are not in the individual cooling process.
But doesn't beer benefit from always staying cold?
...but if you have a bottle conditioned ale, sometimes you can tell the difference because the 'warm' one can reactivate the yeasts and change the flavor slightly.
Definitely a really neat & smart concept -- wonder what it'll cost though.
1. Fill ice cube tray with water 2. Freeze ice cube tray for an hour 3. Take ice cube tray out of freezer 4. Empty ice cube tray into bucket 5. Put drink in bucket 6. Spin drink (with what? your hands?) 7. Take drink out 8. Dump bucket in sink 9. Put the bucket somewhere
As opposed to this device, where it looks like you just put the drink in, press a button, and take it out?
1: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1139594493/spin-chill-wa...
It's just a circular vortex in which u~1/r and there may or may not be a solid body core. A lot of spinny vortices are like this.
I'm not sure where they think their rankine vortex is - whether in the bottle or round the outside - or whether they are accounting for friction when calling it that.
This gadget exploits a common technique for enhancing heat transfer; another example are pipes designed to transport fluid while also causing it to come to thermal equilibrium with the environment as quickly as possible: these pipes sometimes feature rifling which spins the fluid as it flows through them.
If this doesn't lead to carbonation explosions it's because the spinning is not very fast and doesn't lead to much shear.
In short, this is very well understood, in fact utterly routine, technology.
EDIT: On second thought the combined canned fluid + bath fluid together might roughly be considered Rankine-like; this might be what they mean. In that case the fluid inside the can would be in (very roughly) solid-body motion, which implies little agitation (shear).
