Water Cooled Projector

I water cooled a mercury vapour lamp projector, because I thought it would be funny to go through the effort of learning the process of water cooling and cnc milling for this project.

1. An old projector
2. I used a NEC NP510W
3. A water block
4. A Peltier cooler
5. TEC1-12706 recommended
6. Aluminum block
7. 1/4 inch recommended
8. CNC machine
9. Used for cutting the aluminum
10. Heat pipes
11. Vinyl tubing
12. 1/4-inch internal diameter
13. DC water pump
14. 12V and 9V batteries or power supply
15. Thermal pads

Unscrew the screws holding down the outer housing and take it off, this will allow you easy access to the lamp housing and the surrounding area. It is in theory possible to remove without removing the housing but I found that removing it made working with the lamp and the surrounding area easier.

You will need to then remove the lamp housing (the boxy area near the bottom of the image) after, this is where all of the cooling components will be attached to.

You'll need to cut the top of lamp housing, this is to make room for the water block and other components later on, and for easy access for the heat pipes. I used a Dremel for this but you can try whatever works best for you.

You'll also need to cut the aluminum block into a small square around the same size as your water block, and then cut two 9mm channels (or however wide your heat pipes are + a bit of wiggle room), 5 mm deep, into the aluminum block. This is to create an adapter to attach our heat pipes onto to adapt to the water block later.

Take your Peltier cooler, and sandwich it in between the water block and the aluminum block, making sure that the cool side is contacting the aluminum block and hot side contacting the water block. You should also be using thermal pads between the different components, this is to allow for better heat transfer and to act as a bit of a glue to hold everything together, thermal paste should work fine for this as well.

At the same time take two heat pipes, carefully bend them around the lamp and then onto the channels in the aluminum block. Pad the sections where the heat pipes contact the lamp with thermal pads as well.

Place the lamp housing, with all the cooling equipment attached, back into the projector, you may need to Dremel bits of the edge of the projector housing for clearance.

Most projectors will also have a safety pin that is held down by the housing, you can usually bypass this pretty easily by using something like a piece of cardboard to hold this down.

Once everything is secure, attach your vinyl tubing and connect the water block to your pump and a water reservoir of some sort (I used a plastic box but you should probably do something more permanent).

Connect both the Peltier cooler and the electric pump to a power source, I used a battery but a power supply would work as well. Wait for the loop to start circulating before turning the projector on.

At this point I have a very bare bones working prototype, in the future I may try to upgrade a few things:

1. Making the housing and attachment of the various cooling components more permanent and secure
2. Connecting the Peltier cooler and pump to run off of the projectors power supply
3. Using a microcontroller to provide false signals to the projector to allow for the fans to be disconnected (as it is no longer needed)
4. Potentially water cooling other areas of the projector such as the chipset and power supply