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New Semiconductor Coolers
An anonymous reader writes: "A new thermoelectric material is 2.4X as efficient as
best existing materials. The new solid state heat pumps
can provide 700 watts of cooling (nearly one horsepower)
with just one square centimeter. These new materials have the
potential to replace current heat sinks, thermoelectric
generators and mechanical heat pumps.
You can also read an article in nature."
cool!
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Now it will only take about a square foot of this new material to cool the Pentium 4 processors.
If it won't boot, Fsck it!
All the same, they sounds like fun things for extreme overclocking.
Are the geeks going to gather around them and gossip?
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There was a brief bit on NPR about this a few days ago. NPR recording
This would be great for those of us with 1.4GHz Athlons rumbling away in the corner.
I expect that it will start of as some kind of heat spreader material on CPUs themselves, and possibly in the base plate of the heatsink. It is probably very expensive.
Itanium will need a tonne of the stuff... :)
Sure, it's a hoax, but nothing else will suffice.
Although Peltier cooling is pretty nifty, too.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I wonder if these could be put into various locations in heatsinks to allow more efficient dispersal of the heat throughout the entire structure (and from there, pure passive dispersal - no fans).
0x0D 0x0A
Cool!
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
a couple of them in fact. (look to the bottom of the page)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Humor Yes Good news But kindly dont be too happy...news from the black labs of intel is that they are going full steam to make sure the new pentiums evaporate these johnny come lately heat conductors or whatever those idiot /.ies call them.
End Humor
PS:these above tags are for those highly honourable moderators who cant distinguish between an attempt at humor and a troll....
Wanted : A Signature.
So now with this new device CPUs can run Cooler thus allowing a higher MHZ per chip and allowes more overclocking. So wont this extend the MHZ myth and make lousy chip chip desing going for a while longer atleat untill the chip are used in replacement for heating coils for tosters.
Me personally I am big fan of RISC arcecture it genereally seem to run cooler and with less power plus smooth performace (on most RISC chips)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I haven't had a chance to see the article yet - but I know that there was something a bit back (on /.) on this where they designed small "pumps" that cranked the heat off of stuff and they were very good at it - this sounds very similar.
I suppose I *should* read the article to see.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
A new thermoelectric material is 2.4X as efficient as best existing materials. The new solid state heat pumps can provide 700 watts of cooling (nearly one horsepower) with just one square centimeter. These new materials have the potential to replace current heat sinks, thermoelectric generators and mechanical heat pumps. Just means more overclocking potential. ;)
Hrm. One superconductor, plus a heat sink the size of my car, plus that liquid nitrogen pump, and I might just get Win2k to load in under a minute. Wow.
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
While this is neat and all, I should hope that more effort goes into lower power consumption in general. Just because there's a better way to cool high-power chips doesn't mean that such a chips are a good idea in the first place.
Someone I know who works in embedded systems recently pointed out that most CPU makers have decided to chase performance at all cost without regard to power consumption, and this is leaving embedded systems engineers up a creek.
im still laughing.
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Craig Barrett, 61, Pres, CEO of Intel Corporation was quoted today in a fake press release as saying,
These things are going to get so efficient and semiconductors running so hot that when one of them fails the whole thing will go critical mass. Your box won't just fail, it'll burst into flames and melt into a useless bubbling pool of metal and plastic!
So where does the heat go after it has been 'pumped' away from whatever? - Seams to me that one side of these thermo-electric heat pumps will get quite hot..... I still think there is need for a heat sink to cool the thermocouple so it can keep doing its job.
Wow this author really does have this thing doing everything. Of course here we only think of cooling our new P4 etc etc. In the article they mention everything from only cooling parts of the chip, cool no need for that huge piece of metal, to controling the temp in the production on RNA and other proteins. Basically this guy is saying that this stuff will cool your PC, cure health problems and save the world. Wow. And I would have just been happy with no fan on my proc.
I am 31337 or something.
I say we use these things for some REAL heat dispersion: let's cool the engines of those old VW bugs! They're already air-cooled, so now we could totally overrev the things and make Herbie faster than a Ferrari. Yeeha!
Things you like to hear from geeks: Thank you You're welcome
The material, devised by Rama Venkatasubramanian and co-workers...
I hope they don't name the devices after the inventor. "Give me a Venta..., a Venkatip..., a Venksubrim..., ah dammit! Just give me a heat sink!"
Passing an electric current from one conductor to another can make the interface between them hotter or colder, depending on the direction of the current.
So.. instead of a fan, can I put a thermoelectric cooler on top of the chip so as to eliminate that noisy, always failing, fan?
Does this use a huge amount of power as compared to the fan?
How is it different then a peltier?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Considering the design problems inherent in automotive intercooler design with trying to balance flow and cooling efficiency, it would be wonderful to adapt a technology like this to cooling in racing applications. There have been some theories on the best way to approach this in the past, but something like this would be wonderful!
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
Isn't this just a Peltier cooler with improved materials?
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
The body of this news item is misleading. This material can GENERATE 700 watts of electricity from only one square cm. (specifically under a 58 degree F tempature gradient).
It can also heat and cool things 2.5x more efficiently (then anything else on the market) if you push electrons through it, rather than let them come out.
Very interesting stuff, IMHO. Generating electricity from waste heat with inexpensive materials is a holy grail of sorts in a LOT of applications.
BTW, this is what the patent system was SUPPOSED to protect. True innovation.
http://kered.org
Brings a whole new dimension to those stale Beowulf jokes.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
some other really cool stuff about this.... first off, the advancements that have taken place haven't made it efficient enough to replace most cooling devices, but if they can double the efficiency they believe they could start making 'solid-state' refrigerators and such.... the other really neat thing about this innovation is that not only does the material cool things down, but if you expose it to heat it generates electricity.... there's supposed to be huge potential there... the example i heard was that the material could be used to regain much of the wasted thermal energy put out by combustion engines, perhaps in a type of hybrid gas/elec car.... -- dragonxhero
Due to the problem of fitting larger heatsinks and fans (damn loud things) onto ever smaller motherboards and chips, is it not time to re-think this idea? Would it not be possible to use this new material to pump the heat from the chip to the side of your case? The side of your case could be a very large heatsink. It would require small fins and might even improve the looks somewhat. It would not get hot due to the surface area and heat dispersion. Why use a small (relative) heatsink and excesivily (sp?) loud fan to cool the chip when you already have a large heat release area? Anyway, just a thought.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
yes, this one is just 2.4 times as efficient and works 23,000 times faster. that's why it's a news story.
http://kered.org
The trick is in "stacks of very thin films of two alternating semiconducting materials" Ok, so how thick is this stack. I would imagine that a stack 2CM thick would be capable of collecting twice the energy of a stack 1CM thick. I suppose if we had a stack 7 meters thick it could easily collect 700 watts (assuming the energy was there to collect in the first place.)
Maybe if we left these out in warm sunlight they would collect energy too? They might be cheaper than photovoltaic cells. (perhaps a layer of photovoltaic with a layer of these behind them might be the ticket?)
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
What is the max delta T across these devices? If you want to create a fanless system using one of these, the heatsink on the hot side has to disipate LOTS of heat. that means it will get a lot hotter than room temp, so if these devices can only create a 30C difference, you might only get slightly below room temp on the cold side
My server
Well, since the research was funded by the government (DARPA and ONR) and RTI is suppose to be a nonprofit organization, I would think the patents are already in the public domain or at the very least have very affordible licensing.
"...can provide 700 watts of cooling (nearly one horsepower) with just one square centimeter..."
Can someone explain exactly what this means? I haven't reach thermodynamics in my physics studies yet.
I mean, I understand "700 watts"--that's 700 Joules/second. So presumably a cm^2 of this material can "cool" 700 Joules of heat energy every second. But surely the limiting factor here is how quickly the *air* (or other surrounding medium) can *accept* energy, not how fast the device can pump it out....right?
I saw this same article over at bottomquark except they had a new release linked as well. The release claimed that just a few dots of this material on a chip would replace (plus some!) a regular heat sink. How on earth could that be? What about the areas where dots aren't located?
324006
Could this be used to eliminate the steam turbine stage in nuclear (electric) power generators? Might be more efficient and surely safer as long as there is some way to buffer in case of a sudden huge drop in demand for the output.
What I want to know is when will we see this technology in chip manufacturing, etc?
"A sample size of one is really just statistical masturbation."
Since photovoltaic cells produce less energy the warmer they become, is it possible to combine the two?
A thermoelectric photovoltaic power cell. The thermoelectric keeps the cell cool, and provides some power, and the photovoltaic cell operates at a more optimum, efficient temperature.
I wonder if this technology could be used to create a solid state engine. If you think about it, when you burn fuel in your engine, you're turning the heat energy into horsepower, which is what this material is doing.
My first car had an 81 horsepower engine (at the wheels). I wonder if you can move enough heat energy with this stuff to power a small car?
Alternatively, last week my Saturn blew up because of a sensor fault in the radiator. I cracked a head, torched a few hoses and quite a few other parts got messed up. The repair was close to $2000 to get it back on the road (I only owe $2600 on it). I wonder if this material could be used to cool an engine. What if you were to coat the engine block with this stuff? Could you just run an electric fan across the engine when it got too warm? That would save coolant, a radiator, hoses, a water pump etc! Maybe Porsche could make a smoking air cooled engine again. Maybe the classic Beetle would make a revival!
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
This just gives Kyle more reasons to burn out CPUs pushing them too damned far. The poor little dears, stressed to death trying to find the limits of cooling methodolgies...
Ok, this is off-topic, but my Win2k box boots just as quickly as my Linux box, and they are machines of comparable performance. Both boot in about a minute and a half. The W2K box is a Duron-700, and the Linux box is a dual Celeron-400. Yet I have heard repeatedly that Win2k is slow-booting.
What's going on? Is my IBM 7200rpm hard disk really that fast?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I'm going to make underwear out of it to generate electricity for laptops. I'll call them ass-transformers. Or perhaps tighty-lighties. : )
today is spelling optional day.
Let me see here.
A new Heat Sink material.
Can also be used for generating power.
Does this mean I can soon bring down my electrical bills by over-clocking my Pentium4 and adding an outlet to my computer case?
Cool!
I could stir fry my lunch in my cube!
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
1) A lot of people have posted that this material is 2.4X as efficient as existing materials. This is not correct. According to the paper, they have achieved a 'Figure of Merit' (which is calculated in some fairly complex way) 2.4x greater than previous state of the art. Since they also note that there is no absolute theoretical limit to this metric, I think we can assume that it not only is not efficiency, it doesn't map to efficiency in any linear way.
2) No one seems to have commented yet on the extraordinary thinness of these devices. They achieved a 70K thermal gradient across a 5 micron thickness when running in power conversion mode; this corresponds as they state to 134,000K per cm (!). It's also the root of their extremely fast thermal response (20,000 times faster than previous SoA). And it helps explain their very high watts-per-cm2 figures... in fact I'd say the microthickness, rather than the 2.4x 'efficiency' gain, is the real story here.
When I first got my nick on slashdot, I posted a message. It got modded up.
yep, I got some karma.........well, that's all there is for that feature...
The written word is far too impresise for moderation to be completely accurate. what the writer considers an editorial(which every message on slashdot is by the way), the reader could misinterpet as a troll, or worse yet, he could make the mistake of considering what you say serious. Without ":)"'s, irony and humor is slow to reach the reader when it is surrounded by dead serious posts about exactly the same sentiment.
It's been a long time.
Isn't the theoretical maximum efficiency of a thermocouple on the order of 70%? And that the best created to date were in the 25-30% efficiency range? That would put this new device fairly close to the physical limit, would it not?
A good (and silent) solution for this would be to use this material to transfer the heat from a hot component to some circulating water in a condenser type setup. There could be an external container of recycled water that could be replaced when it gets too hot. This could even be automatic, with an electric valve and thermometer. This material could efficiently move the heat from the component to the water, which has a very high heat capacity, so the external container wouldn't have to be flushed very often. This might be a viable cooling method as processors and other components run at rapidly increasing temperatures.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Does this mean that if I were to hitch up one of my uncle's clydesdales to my PC, it could provide about 700 watts of cooling power? Neat!
These things only TRANSFER the heat.
The biggest problem is the amount of heat.
So if it can transfer the heat to a heat
exchanger OUTSIDE the computer (read heatsink and fan) and not increase the cost of the entire system by $0.001, then you MIGHT see it on a P4, otherwise, no chance in hell on any volume, consumer product.
The article that this post points to says that
this new thermoelectric cooler can be used (in
reverse) to use the car's waste heat to power
the air conditioner. Hmmmm why not use the
damn material AS the air conditioner??
And why is it too expensive to use in refrigerators and such? I'm wondering how
much it will cost. They don't mention that
part.
Paul
Also, you still have to deal with the problem of what to do with all that waste heat that is ultimately being produced by your processor and other hardware. Remember, these thermoelectric coolers aren't getting rid of the heat, they are just moving it to a different spot. I, for one, am more concerned about the ventilation present on my case than with just keeping the processor cool, as I've noticed a difference by as much as 10 degrees F hotter on the processor when I have the case open, which negates the ducting effect.
Finally, as any experienced overclocker (me included) will tell you, no matter how much cooling you have for a chip, you will only be able to clock it so high before it becomes unbootable. Having a more efficient Peltier will not help you one bit in overclocking.
So, sure, this is a cool discovery for materials physics, but it really isn't going to help people in the way you suggested in your post.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Just think of the computers this could make, well with 2 other articles. The one about mother boards with fiber optics, and the one about molecular transistors. i need me one of them!
You know, thermoelectric coolers are not
designed to JUST cool. The other great thing
about them is that they are perfect for
temperature control. The computer will be
able to regulate its own processors temperature
but reversing the polarity of the power going
to the TEC as needed (so it would heat instead
of cool if the temp gets too low) so that the
temp will be cool but now below the dew point
so that there will be NO condensation.
Pretty cool idea huh?
Paul
I live in Australia and in the northern part of my state (i live at the bottom of the mainland),
They are considering building a 1km high tower with a large greenhouse at the bottom, the sun warms air in the greenhouse and hot air rises so air flys up the tower. At the base of the tower is a large fan which is spun by the air going up and it will be used for power generation.
Just wondering, has anybody figured out if it is possible to use this technology to build a large tower and use it for power generation, also what would the figures be for power generation, cost (a biggy) life-span structural strength etc.
Also, you could possibly utilize a coastal volcano and build a big one of these with heatsinks either end and stick one heatsink in the water, or pump water up over it and sit the other end above the lava.
so basically your saying i can take 2gig dual p3 system and make it really really fast instad of just really fast?! NEAT!
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
My dad used to work for a plastics plant, and they got a contract back during the Bacelona Olympic Games to build these 4 by 3 by 1 tubs for Mars Bars. There were yo build a tub then insert into the bottom what was essentialy a ceremic coin about an inch in diameter with 2 diods sticking out. This coin, made in on a sub-contract in Malaysia and designed by the Japanese had the abality to keep that tub, filled with Mars bars cool so as the Mars bars didn't melt. I don't really know how it worked, but my dad mentioned to me that theyed apply 18 volts of current to it and it'd heat up on one side and freeze on the other. it was so cold taht when one of my dads co-workers touched it, his skin froze over and tore. It needed 2 fans to cool it.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.