Water Jacket - Applications

Applications

Water jackets are often used in watercooling. They are also used in laboratory glassware: Liebig, Graham, and Allihn condensers. Water jackets were used to cool the barrels of machine guns at the time of the First World War, but modern machine guns are air-cooled to conserve weight and hence increase portability.

In a reciprocating piston internal combustion engine the water jacket is a series of holes either cast or bored through the main engine block and connected by inlet and outlet valves to a radiator.

Equipment such as tissue culture incubators may be enclosed in a water jacket kept at a constant temperature.