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."

Comments

Can we get rid of the fan though?

[hattig]

With a suitably sized heatsink made of this material, can we get rid of the noisy fan, or at least replace it with a slower, quieter fan.

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... :)

Re:Can we get rid of the fan though?

[drinkypoo]

With a suitably sized heatsink made of this material, can we get rid of the noisy fan, or at least replace it with a slower, quieter fan.

You're missing the point; We don't make heat sinks out of peltier junctions, we put them on top of peltier junctions. In order to keep the heat sink cool, we put a fan on them.

In other words, we will never make heat sinks out of this material. We'll simply transfer heat to them with it. Current heat sinks work fine.

Re:Can we get rid of the fan though?

[drinkypoo]

The "works fine" mentality would have stopped most of the innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries...

Yeah, if everyone had it about everything. If you're dissatisfied with current heat sink technology, go do something about it instead of slashdotting.

I personally prefer the way the HP Kayaks handle cooling these days; The power supply fan blows out (like a good little fan) and there's another 3 or 4" fan which blows in, and there's a big plastic shroud which ducts the air toward the CPU's heatsink, which doesn't have a fan on it. The bigger fan can turn at lower RPMs to move more air, and thus is quieter, and more reliable.

There's nothing wrong with fans. They work better than convective cooling in that if you are in a room with very little airflow, a convective system will heat up the air around the system, therefore heating up the whole system. They just need to be quieter, and they all need to be brushless and preferrably magnetically supported, rather than a bushing or bearing.

Will this extend the Mhz myth.

[jellomizer]

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)

A fix at the wrong end

[Junks Jerzey]

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.

Re:What I am wondering

[Unknown Bovine Group]

The questions in my mind that the articles didn't (and seemingly never) address:

1) How long until I can go pick one up?
2) How many patents are going to keep the price of this sky high for the next 20 years?

Re:When cooling fails

[posmon]

the china syndome?

Re:They invented... the Peltier?

[Trinn]

It's 2.4x as efficient.
I've not been through the whole article, but that seems to be what it means. It apparently uses a very similar if not the same effect, just with better, more efficient materials.

404 - .sig not found

misleading headline - this GENERATES power

[deander2]

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.

It can do what now?

[BillyGoatThree]

"...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?