anvilmark writes "ABCNews has an article about a new carbon based thermal conducting foam. Very pricey to produce but has 4-5 times the efficiency of copper at 1/5th the weight of aluminum. ORNL technical documentation available here and here. Sounds like the perfect heat sink shim to me."
The Salvation of AMD
by
Captain+Smooth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is definitely plus for all the AMD buffs out there. Also good for the company. Provided this becomes a little cheaper, this and the Hammer could really give a boost to AMD's market share.
--
The ability to monopolize an industry is insignificant, next to the power of the source.
MIT developed army suit
by
SteakandcheeseUm
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
the end of the article states
. Both Klett and Conway have started doing research for the government to adapt the foam for use in "personal cooling devices" for military personnel.
I wonder if they will try to intigrate this into the Nanotech suit that is being developed by MIT? or is this before that
New From NERF the frisby you can cook in! Really though, this foam is expensive. Even using the foam as a conductive pad between the heatsink and CPU would be extremely expensive. Although it would help prevent cracking the chips. Besides, there is a lot more than just conductivity to think about in designing pots and pans. If the pan conducts the heat too effeciently the food will burn where the pan and heat source come in contact, and not cook entirely the rest of the way through. This is why some people still prefer cast iron to aluminum any day. Aluminum pans almost always burn the food unless they're constantly stired.
they could make the fan out of this stuff, and it would be both a heat sink and fan.
-- The Kruger Dunning explains most post on/. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Great heat pipe material
by
vought
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You could make a nicely-shaped heat pipe with this stuff, tranferring heat from say, a processor to the outside of the case easily. I'm sure hardware and environmental engineers will have a ball with this stuff if it can be produced relatively inexpensively.
Re:Great heat pipe material
by
jaoswald
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· Score: 2
Not so great. Heat pipes work BETTER than copper of similar volume, by a substantial factor. That's why they are used instead of copper for the kinds of applications you are talking about.
Research and development
by
reflexreaction
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Klett admits that it is highly unlikely the foam will break out of the lab and into widely available commercial applications anytime soon.
Stories like this have always annoyed me. You always hear about the possible development of an item that is four or five (or however many years) away from being put into commercial application but after that you never hear about it. Or if it is used commerically you never hear about where it has been put into use. I work in the scientific field and I almost never hear about an exciting development after it's initial announcement.
The one exception to this is pixie dust that has allowed for the phenomeonal growth of hard drives. Oh well.
--
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
Re:Research and development
by
darkonc
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In many cases, the great scientific breakthrough will point people into a general direction that produces something better than the original breakthrough...
(think of basic research as a bunch of blind men trying to hit a bullseye... The breakthrough is hitting the board. Once people know where the board is, someone else is likely to actually hit the bullseye -- so you hear about the person who first hits the board, and the person who hits the bullseye, but it's rare that the connection between the two events make it through the "15 seconds of fame" filter of media editing.
-- Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Except that ESD foam is electrically conductive, not (very) thermally conductive. Actually, ESD foam isn't really even all that electrically conductive.
-- "Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Oh come on, we had these when I was a kid..
by
Bowie+J.+Poag
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"Themoconductive carbon foam"? Puh-leaze. We had this shit when I was a kid. Magic Snakes -- You put em on the sidewalk and light them on fire. Just like the one that nearly wiped out South Park last 4th of July.:)
We were swimming in the stuff!;)
-- Bowie J. Poag
Re:Oh come on, we had these when I was a kid..
by
kawika
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· Score: 2
I agree. Let me burn a couple of points here to whack on the moderators. I love a joke as much as the other guy, but this one isn't very good. Plus, I'm getting a little tired of the highest rated post in every thread being a cute comeback. Moderators, please make sure there are no useful or informative posts around before using your points on a lame joke.
Rocket engines need high thermal conductivity, to lower the inner temperature of the rocket engine, and light weight. If this material is as good as they say then provided they can sort out any potential mechanical issues this could well be an excellent material to use- graphite works very well anyway, and this sounds like it might work better.
--
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
Re:Dumb question
by
NanoProf
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you heat it up hot enough in the presence of
oxygen, it will burn. So will a diamond, for that
matter. The 3000 degree heat treatment
that they use during synthesis must be done
in an inert atmosphere. Coal burns more
easily than diamonds, I'd guess, but both
are carbon with fairly similar heats of
combustion. Local carbon bonding comes in
two main forms, sp2 (triangular) and sp3 (tetrahedral) bonding; the binding energies of
the two are quite close and both will happily
burn in the presence of oxygen, at high
temperatures.
Not sure you know what the hell a shim is, dude. A shim refers to a piece of metal that is sandwiched between the heatsink and the proc to prevent crushing the proc core.
Not sure why the hell you'd use this stuff for a shim. As documented here and here, shims are generally useless and can cause more damage to processors because of heat/electrical distribution. Thus, shims are generally used to insure that shipping of the core by an over-zealous heatsink install will not occur. There are problems, however, being that if the shim is not exactly perfect, it will be either useless will create a gap between the heatsink and the proc, causing fryage.
Thus, most shims are made of light, nonconducting, cheap, oxidized aluminum. I could see abolutely no reason to make a shim out of this stuff.
Unless you meant to talk about the cap on the Pentium 4 procs. In which case, the purpose of the cap is just to spread heat around, and it serves its purpose fine. Intel isn't gonna make their procs a hundred bucks more expensive to help overclockers, whom they don't support anyway.
I wasn't thinking about the shim when I posted about the fan. I was thinking the fan could be the heat sink. so you have a heatsink that moves the air away from the chip. It would be lighter, which means it would take less enrgy to spin the blades, and the foam would be quiter.
-- The Kruger Dunning explains most post on/. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
3000 degrees? I thought they said 1100?
by
zerofoo
·
· Score: 2
I thought they "baked" this stuff at around 1100 degrees not 3000. Am I wrong?
Don't forget that a materials heat conductivity is always exactly proportional to its electrical conductivity. Maybe we can use this new material for low density semiconductors!!
The electrical implimentations are limitless!!
An athletic suit
by
GreenPhreak
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It would be cool if you could make an athletic suit out of this material for athletes to wear to prevent being overheated. It would block the sun's rays (reducing heat), but allow excess thermal energy to slough off a runner into his/her surroundings. Maybe the foam would be too rigid to make into a wearable apparatus, but it sounds like a cool idea. Either way, it beats sweating in order to cool down.
-- I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared.
-Soda Popinksi
Will not work. Even if you workout naked -- uncovered -- and in the darkness (hush!) -- no sun rays, you still get overheated (assuming "room" temperature) and sweat. Sweat cools you down by evaporating, but this material will prevent the evaporation. Unless,
of course, it is also porous...
Re:Make a beer keg blanket to keep your kegs cool.
by
GigsVT
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They need to make a "-1 Totally wrong" moderation up just for you.
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
One problem.....
by
Veramocor
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If you read the literature fully you'll find that the thermal conductivity is directionally orienented. So if you go 90 degrees in the other direction of the fibers it basically has a thermalconductivity of 1/5 aluminum. (see table 1 of the second ducument).
This may not matter for applictions like a processor, but cooling other objects with more of a 3-d surface may be a problem.
-- Veramocor
Re:shim..sink - what's the difference?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A shim is a small plate composed of thermally conductive material that you put between an FCPGA CPU and the heat sink. It has holes for the chip and the other parts of the CPU that rise above the rest.
The idea is to increase the amount contact surface area between the CPU and the heatsink.
Re:Make a beer keg blanket to keep your kegs cool.
by
JesseL
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· Score: 2
Using good thermal conductors for keeping things cool only works when they are hotter than ambient. This stuff will not help keep your fridge or your keg cool. Also, using this foam for cooling things like engines will only work as long as it can transfer heat to the air more efficiently than what they already have, otherwise the foam will just get heat-saturated and your engine will still be too hot.
-- "Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Re:Goofy comparisons
by
GigsVT
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Uh, wrong, try again.
Where did you find this "fact", the encyclopedia retardica?
Alumina, i.e. sapphires et al, have high thermal conductivity, and yet are almost total insulators. QED.
Please, please, try to check your facts. We all make mistakes, but I have seen so many totally wrong posts in this article that it is depressing me.
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yep, and also, I have a multimeter and a piece of ESD foam right here. (God I'm a geek), and it measures 30,000-100,000 ohms depending on how close you put the probes to each other.
I can't believe how many TOTALLY IGNORANT posts there are in this article.
(not you JesseL, the parent of the thread)
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I am utterly amazed....
by
dr_db
·
· Score: 5, Informative
That so many posters confuse a heat conductor with a heat pump.
Come on - this will not be "keeping your fridge colder" or "cooling your drinks". It will just make whatever it's attached to move to the ambient temperature faster. Wrap it around your fridge and you will have sour cream in your milk, etc. Or else the coldest kitchen around.
Either it's a brain dead friday, or the collective IQ of Slashdot is lower than I assumed over the last few years.
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
AnalogBoy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The collective IQ has dropped significantly. About now, the 2nd generation of slashdotters are making their exodus to other news sites - or - worse - the real world. By leaving the collective and making the ratio of clue decreases, leaving the bottom-rung stallmanite slashdrones to pick up the slack, so to speak. in addition the average age is now lower.
Perhaps we should charter a report on slashdot groupthink. if i were in college i'd do it.
Alternately, i accept the idea that it is indeed brainded friday.
[Disclaimer - Due to the extraction of a wisdom tooth today and the subsequent mind-numbing hydrocodone, i do not claim responsibility for the content or readability of my above post. It makes sense as i type it. thats all that matters. =) ]
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
shaar
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· Score: 3, Informative
uhm... a fridge is a heat pump that takes heat from the inside and moves it outside. so wrapping this around your fridge (back of the fridge in particular) will give you a really _hot_ kitchen, and a really really cold fridge (given no hardware failure). The body of the fridge would do a decent job of insulating the outside from the inside, the conductor will just help the heat pump.
For somebody lambasting posters for not having a good grasp of heat transfer, you sure didn't spend much time thinking about it.
That so many posters confuse a heat conductor with a heat pump.
We're not all engineers, you know. Some of us are English Majors.
Speaking of which, you've got a nasty sentence fragment problem there...
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
sweet+reason
·
· Score: 2, Informative
wrapping this around your fridge (back of the fridge in particular) will give you a really _hot_ kitchen
it might make the fridge's heat exchanger slightly more efficient, but that just means the compressor won't need to run quite so long to cool the fridge, which in turn means the kitchen will get less hot, since the heat given of by a fridge comes mostly from the motor. the heat being moved from the inside came from the outside in the first place.
-- Everything should be made as simple as possible,
but not simpler. -- A.E.
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
AnalogBoy
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· Score: 2
Actually, the slashdot system, like any other system run by a human being, is corrupt.. look up $rtbl's, modbombing, etc.
IMHO, it's much better to mod UP intelligent comments than mod DOWN the endless stream of idiotic drivel that goes on here. It's easier to seperate the wheat from the chaff than the chaff from the wheat.
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
Dirtside
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· Score: 3, Funny
leaving the bottom-rung stallmanite slashdrones
Yeah, but you're still here. I blame the hydrocodone.:)
-- "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
AnalogBoy
·
· Score: 2
I have a lot of free time. I won't remember typing any of this tomorrow.
You know, i've tried to give up on slashdot many times before, but its so easy to be baited back into a debate here. Being me on slashdot is like being a masochistic atheist who regularly attends a baptist church. I don't have anything against linux or freebsd, really... they have their uses.. but its their fan clubs i have a problem with:)
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
hyrdra
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My god! The TRAVESTY! We all must be utterly retarded if we don't know the difference between a heat pump and a heat conductor!
Jeez, what a jerk. There are always common misconceptions, even among geeks. We're all here to learn and gain more knowledge via interesting and thought provoking conversation on Slashdot.
So don't come off like an ass hole. I'm sure someone has set you straight in something embarrassingly stupid that you should've known.
--
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
digitalunity
·
· Score: 2
Puhlease... Mensa level IQ. That means that 1 out of 50 random citizens could beat you on the same IQ test. It's not really a very high accomplishment. How about having an IQ in the top.2%? I have a feeling that many of the people on/. are in fact in the top 2% of Americans with respect to intelligence.
Then again, you could simply disregard this post completely. I am an *elitist snob* by nature.
-- You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
digitalunity
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No, I'm serious. And I really am an elitist snob, a perfectionist, an intravert, as well American(good guess; I didn't presume that about you though).
My biggest problem with the average American is complacency and apathy. In this day and age(I'm only 20, btw) people are fucking ecstatic about spending their last dime on status symbols they can't afford. It's consumerism at it's worst. That is why I am such a snob. I'm 20; I own 2 cars outright. I work very hard, but I'm not a workaholic. I have a good job, and I'm surrounded by low income white trash(excuse the expression) who can't get a better job because they don't care enough to excersize their minds as much as their wallets.
Research studies have shown that it is never too late to increase your brains capacity for knowledge or learn new skills. They would all drown in their own self created pity-pools if they weren't so apathetic about their lives.
As far as Mensa goes, I took the online pretest and got 29 out of 30 in 16 minutes. After reading about Mensa, they came off even more elitist than I yet had less to back it up. That, and they seemed a little droll. The last time I took my IQ test, I scored in the top.68%:)
-- You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Re:I am utterly amazed....
by
digitalunity
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, IQ test results should always be compared in percentiles. The numbers are different for every test. I do web development and I design and build sports car parts. I do a little mechanic work in my garage, but that's only when I go out and spend all my money and really need some.
-- You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Heat sink shims are for balancing the pressure of the heat sink on the CPU die so that the heat is transferred evenly and that the core doesn't get damaged by unequal pressure. It does nothing for cooling. You could use concrete if you wanted to, it is just that nobody would buy that because it isn't a colorful shade of copper.
-- --------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Great for Cooling UltraDense Clusters & Handhe
by
LuxuryYacht
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is a great material for cooling supercomputers and ultra-dense servers that would otherwise require more elaborate elaborate liquid cooling systems.
The handheld and laptop market is another area that could really use this to keep the cpu and graphics processor cool.
This sounds like it takes highly thermally conductive polymers like CoolPoly to another level. .
-- Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Good for space
by
in+seine
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just the thing to keep things cool in orbit. This is important because the effeciency of solar panels goes down as they get hot. The only way for the heat to get out is ratiation and your opponent is the sun.
I remember when I was in sixth grade, what 8 years ago, and we were visiting the local state university. One of the professors had a lecture about research he was doing in to sonic refrigeration, and even showed us some units that could build up a pretty good sized thermal gradient. Being the environmentally conscious little git I was, wanting a freon free frige, I asked him how far from a commercial product they were. He said 3-4 years.....
Not sure where the 4-5 times copper efficiency comes from.
If you read Poco Graphite's tech specs on the material, you'll see that the thermal conductivity is between 100-150 W/m-K . Depending on alloy, copper runs 3 times better at between 350-400 W/m-K. Good aluminum gets close to 200 W/m-K.
You aren't going to see this stuff used in a radiator unless weight is a primary constraint. Looks to me like/. and ABC news got hyped into running non-news.
Re:Not all that hot...
by
jmichaelg
·
· Score: 4, Informative
....PURE copper runs 350-400 W/m-K...pure copper isn't usually used, an alloy is.
I was talking about copper alloys. At room temperature, Both copper 110 and 101 alloys have a thermal conductivity of 391 W/m-k. Phosphorous laced copper alloys will drop you down to around 380. The only reason I happen to have these numbers is I'm currently working on a heat sink.
The news article that got this thread going had so many inaccuracies that I'm prone to think that a marketeer at Poco got somebody at ABC News all excited with hype. Given the foam's poor thermal conductivity, I seriously doubt the national security agency is using it as a heat sink unless, possibly, it's on a satellite. But if that were the case, Poco would have been nda'd and the story wouldn't have made light of day. The story smells of marketeer-speak.
You're right about the density uneveness. There are several elemental foams available that have very uniform density. You can get metal silver foams for applications where surface area is very important. John Carnack (of doom fame) has been playing around with silver foams as a catalyst for hydrogen peroxide to drive his rocket.
However, as a heatsink, foams don't fare well because heat transfer is partially a function, not of surface area as you assert, but of the cross-sectional area perpendicular to heat flow. Foams have lots of surface area which is nice for catalysts but have lousy cross-sectional areas which is what is needed to transfer heat from one edge of the foam to the other. Once the heat is spread out over a heatsink's mass, THEN the heatsink's surface area comes into play. Foams suffer as heatsinks because they can't move heat well from the primary hot spot to their extremeties.
Having said all that, there's some experimental work going on with carbon heat sinks that are configured in standard heatsink geometries. Anandtech's Cebit report shows a few pictures of some carbon heatsinks. Carbon is attractive, because as an element, it does show promise. As a working material, it's difficult. If carbon nanotubes ever get out of the lab, there'll be a huge change - they've got great thermal conductivity - somewhere in the thousands of watts.
Carbon this, carbon that
by
Tomster
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Have you noticed how it seems like nearly every recent significant advance in materials sciences and engineering is based on carbon? Sheesh, pretty soon they'll be announcing carbon based life forms....
think outside the beige box...
by
llamalicious
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
add-on heat conductors for improving air-ventilation on disc brakes... make make WRX even happier:)
useful in supersonic aircraft... conduct the heat away from leading edges much faster than normal.
c'mon, join in... what other real-world apps could this be useful for. if the price can come down, and the production can come up... I can think of a lot more places this stuff would make sense.
Double braindead, it seems
by
PhysicsGenius
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You are wrong and they are right...but for the wrong reasons.
A high-efficiency heat conductor is one that acts quickly. In other words, when a fast moving atom/molecule hits it, the conductor responds more quickly in absorbing the thermal energy and transmitting it to the ambient environment. A 100% efficient conductor would transmit this energy so quickly that all fast moving atoms would come to a virtual standstill inside the container--in other words, absolute zero.
Practically speaking this never happens. Still, wrapping a really fast conductor around a soft drink will cool it off. But you still wouldn't want to do that because you couldn't pick up the glass--the outer surface is going to be hot.
Re:Double braindead, it seems
by
jaoswald
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Sorry, try again.
Conduction through a heat conductor can be represented with the thermal equivalent of Ohm's law. Warmth of a soft drink above room temperature is equivalent to a charged capacitor, where you can consider the room to be ground.
In your drink experiment, a drink warmer than room temperature will equilibrate to room temperature eventually. The speed with which it will equilibrate with a time constant
tau = RC
where R is the thermal resistance, C the heat capacity of the soft drink.
Lower R (better thermal conductivity) means the time is faster. However, when all is said and done, the drink and the room are all the same temperature, and that temperature does NOT depend on the thermal conductivity. It depends on the relative heat capacities. Given that the room is much bigger than the drink, its heat capacity is much larger, so the change in room temperature is negligible. (The amount of heat in a warm drink is the amount of heat in an infinitesimally warmer room.)
The only thing that could get signficantly hotter is a cold drink in a warm room.
I think you need to study a bit harder, Mr. PhysicsGenius.
I worked for the manufacturer - Poco Graphite
by
chrisflusche
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I worked for POCO Graphite in Decatur, Texas up until 6 months ago. POCO is the only licensed manufacturer of graphite foam (POCOFoam is their name for it).
This stuff isn't just good for a heat sink shim - IT CAN EASILY REPLACE YOUR ENTIRE HEATSINK AND FAN! But- heatsinks are only the beginning. POCO has made prototype car radiators out of this stuff that are 6 inches by 8 inches by 1 inch - AND THEY WORK EXTREMELY WELL!
To get an idea of just how well POCOFoam transfers heat, check out this video clip http://www.pocofoam.com/images/foam.mov. You will be highly impressed - I guarantee!
Why would you want a shim? Make a heatsink instead
by
Hektor_Troy
·
· Score: 2
A shim (as I understand it) will do about as much for your heat transfer as jumping up and down will cause an earthquake. More or less.
I thought, that maybe I was missing something in my vocabulary (english isn't my maternal language), but neither Merriam-Webster nor my Oxford dictionary was able to find more than one meaning of the word:
a thin often tapered piece of material (as wood, metal, or stone) used to fill in space between things (as for support, leveling, or adjustment of fit)
If you were to create a heat spreader (the chip on the left) as in the old socket 370 celerons and new Pentium III and Pentium IV (the large block of metal protecting the chip die), it would probably be a lot more useful (depending on it's strength of course).
If it is stong enough, it would probably be quite useful as a heatsink as well, although it would probably cost you a bundle at the moment.
But why use it as a shim? What next? Only use money for wiping your butt (don't try this trick with coins. Don't ask!)?
-- We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Re:shim..sink - what's the difference?
by
Osty
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A shim is a small plate composed of thermally conductive material that you put between an FCPGA CPU and the heat sink. It has holes for the chip and the other parts of the CPU that rise above the rest.
Nope. A shim is generally not thermally conductive (and better damn well not be electrically conductive...), since it doesn't matter whether it is or not.
The idea is to increase the amount contact surface area between the CPU and the heatsink.
Again, wrong. The idea is not to increase the amount of contact surface between the CPU and the heatsink, as this would be impossible to do, unless you made the CPU itself larger -- heat only radiates off of a CPU from the little rectangular core in the middle; the ceramic surrounding the contact point has little to no thermal conductivity. Instead, the idea is to give the heatsink a larger area to which to apply pressure. This means it's going to be more difficult (though not impossible) to chip the CPU core if you're using a shim than if you're not. Shims only became popular with the Athlon Thunderbird chips that were trivially easy to break with a sloppy heatsink install. Since those shims were made out of copper (bad! that's electrically conductive, which means you could very easily short out your CPU), many of the more clueless overclockers instantly thought "copper == cool", and thus assumed that shims were another way to lower their CPU temps by a couple more degrees. They were wrong.
While not the same thing, carbon has been used as a heatsink interface material for years. My DEC Alpha came with a Grafoil pad to use between the processor and the heatsink, in lieu of heat sink paste. It's apparently spongy graphite made into a flexible pad.
Sure, this stuff is more efficient than copper for conducting heat, meaning it has a low thermal resistance. However, to continue the electrical analogy, I wonder what would be the "thermal current" it could support? That is, how many watts could this material really dissipate? For all we know from the article, maybe if you try to put in more than a few watts per square inch, the stuff melts or catches fire.
-- Patrick Doyle I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Re:3000 degrees? I thought they said 1100?
by
zerofoo
·
· Score: 2
Yup, you're right. That's an insane amount of heat....this product won't be cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
This is definitely plus for all the AMD buffs out there. Also good for the company. Provided this becomes a little cheaper, this and the Hammer could really give a boost to AMD's market share.
The ability to monopolize an industry is insignificant, next to the power of the source.
the end of the article states
. Both Klett and Conway have started doing research for the government to adapt the foam for use in "personal cooling devices" for military personnel.
I wonder if they will try to intigrate this into the Nanotech suit that is being developed by MIT? or is this before that
I want a set of pots and pans in this stuff!
they could make the fan out of this stuff, and it would be both a heat sink and fan.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You could make a nicely-shaped heat pipe with this stuff, tranferring heat from say, a processor to the outside of the case easily. I'm sure hardware and environmental engineers will have a ball with this stuff if it can be produced relatively inexpensively.
Klett admits that it is highly unlikely the foam will break out of the lab and into widely available commercial applications anytime soon.
Stories like this have always annoyed me. You always hear about the possible development of an item that is four or five (or however many years) away from being put into commercial application but after that you never hear about it. Or if it is used commerically you never hear about where it has been put into use. I work in the scientific field and I almost never hear about an exciting development after it's initial announcement.
The one exception to this is pixie dust that has allowed for the phenomeonal growth of hard drives. Oh well.
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What if they made Peeps out of this stuff?
sulli
RTFJ.
Screw heatsink shroud. This sounds like a great mobo backing over the pin array on the back. And as a plug filler inbetween sockets.
Sounds like it'd do a wonder for preventing condensation, and helping at the same time for Pelter use..
sissy panzies and there water only setup's.
Computational Madness in a round package.
Except that ESD foam is electrically conductive, not (very) thermally conductive. Actually, ESD foam isn't really even all that electrically conductive.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
"Themoconductive carbon foam"? Puh-leaze. We had this shit when I was a kid. Magic Snakes -- You put em on the sidewalk and light them on fire. Just like the one that nearly wiped out South Park last 4th of July.
We were swimming in the stuff!
Bowie J. Poag
The Germans made their Zepplins out of this stuff sixty years ago.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Rocket engines need high thermal conductivity, to lower the inner temperature of the rocket engine, and light weight. If this material is as good as they say then provided they can sort out any potential mechanical issues this could well be an excellent material to use- graphite works very well anyway, and this sounds like it might work better.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"If you heat it up hot enough in the presence of oxygen, it will burn. So will a diamond, for that matter. The 3000 degree heat treatment that they use during synthesis must be done in an inert atmosphere. Coal burns more easily than diamonds, I'd guess, but both are carbon with fairly similar heats of combustion. Local carbon bonding comes in two main forms, sp2 (triangular) and sp3 (tetrahedral) bonding; the binding energies of the two are quite close and both will happily burn in the presence of oxygen, at high temperatures.
Curtains for windows?
Not sure you know what the hell a shim is, dude.
A shim refers to a piece of metal that is sandwiched between the heatsink and the proc to prevent crushing the proc core.
Not sure why the hell you'd use this stuff for a shim. As documented here and here, shims are generally useless and can cause more damage to processors because of heat/electrical distribution. Thus, shims are generally used to insure that shipping of the core by an over-zealous heatsink install will not occur. There are problems, however, being that if the shim is not exactly perfect, it will be either useless will create a gap between the heatsink and the proc, causing fryage.
Thus, most shims are made of light, nonconducting, cheap, oxidized aluminum. I could see abolutely no reason to make a shim out of this stuff.
Unless you meant to talk about the cap on the Pentium 4 procs. In which case, the purpose of the cap is just to spread heat around, and it serves its purpose fine. Intel isn't gonna make their procs a hundred bucks more expensive to help overclockers, whom they don't support anyway.
I thought they "baked" this stuff at around 1100 degrees not 3000. Am I wrong?
-ted
The electrical implimentations are limitless!!
It would be cool if you could make an athletic suit out of this material for athletes to wear to prevent being overheated. It would block the sun's rays (reducing heat), but allow excess thermal energy to slough off a runner into his/her surroundings. Maybe the foam would be too rigid to make into a wearable apparatus, but it sounds like a cool idea. Either way, it beats sweating in order to cool down.
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
I can see many potential uses for this, including shaving foam and marshmallows that make your cocoa cold.
slashdot!=valid HTML
They need to make a "-1 Totally wrong" moderation up just for you.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If you read the literature fully you'll find that the thermal conductivity is directionally orienented. So if you go 90 degrees in the other direction of the fibers it basically has a thermalconductivity of 1/5 aluminum. (see table 1 of the second ducument).
This may not matter for applictions like a processor, but cooling other objects with more of a 3-d surface may be a problem.
Veramocor
A shim is a small plate composed of thermally conductive material that you put between an FCPGA CPU and the heat sink. It has holes for the chip and the other parts of the CPU that rise above the rest.
The idea is to increase the amount contact surface area between the CPU and the heatsink.
Using good thermal conductors for keeping things cool only works when they are hotter than ambient. This stuff will not help keep your fridge or your keg cool. Also, using this foam for cooling things like engines will only work as long as it can transfer heat to the air more efficiently than what they already have, otherwise the foam will just get heat-saturated and your engine will still be too hot.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Uh, wrong, try again.
Where did you find this "fact", the encyclopedia retardica?
Alumina, i.e. sapphires et al, have high thermal conductivity, and yet are almost total insulators. QED.
Please, please, try to check your facts. We all make mistakes, but I have seen so many totally wrong posts in this article that it is depressing me.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yep, and also, I have a multimeter and a piece of ESD foam right here. (God I'm a geek), and it measures 30,000-100,000 ohms depending on how close you put the probes to each other.
I can't believe how many TOTALLY IGNORANT posts there are in this article.
(not you JesseL, the parent of the thread)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That so many posters confuse a heat conductor with a heat pump.
Come on - this will not be "keeping your fridge colder" or "cooling your drinks". It will just make whatever it's attached to move to the ambient temperature faster. Wrap it around your fridge and you will have sour cream in your milk, etc. Or else the coldest kitchen around.
Either it's a brain dead friday, or the collective IQ of Slashdot is lower than I assumed over the last few years.
carbon based thermal conducting foam, huh? I wonder if I can encase someone in this stuff and hang em up on the wall in my desert palace...
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Heat sink shims are for balancing the pressure of the heat sink on the CPU die so that the heat is transferred evenly and that the core doesn't get damaged by unequal pressure. It does nothing for cooling. You could use concrete if you wanted to, it is just that nobody would buy that because it isn't a colorful shade of copper.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
This is a great material for cooling supercomputers and ultra-dense servers that would otherwise require more elaborate elaborate liquid cooling systems.
The handheld and laptop market is another area that could really use this to keep the cpu and graphics processor cool.
This sounds like it takes highly thermally conductive polymers like CoolPoly to another level.
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Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Just the thing to keep things cool in orbit. This is important because the effeciency of solar panels goes down as they get hot. The only way for the heat to get out is ratiation and your opponent is the sun.
I remember when I was in sixth grade, what 8 years ago, and we were visiting the local state university. One of the professors had a lecture about research he was doing in to sonic refrigeration, and even showed us some units that could build up a pretty good sized thermal gradient. Being the environmentally conscious little git I was, wanting a freon free frige, I asked him how far from a commercial product they were. He said 3-4 years.....
BlackGriffen
Not sure where the 4-5 times copper efficiency comes from.
/. and ABC news got hyped into running non-news.
If you read Poco Graphite's tech specs on the material, you'll see that the thermal conductivity is between 100-150 W/m-K . Depending on alloy, copper runs 3 times better at between 350-400 W/m-K. Good aluminum gets close to 200 W/m-K.
You aren't going to see this stuff used in a radiator unless weight is a primary constraint. Looks to me like
Have you noticed how it seems like nearly every recent significant advance in materials sciences and engineering is based on carbon? Sheesh, pretty soon they'll be announcing carbon based life forms....
add-on heat conductors for improving air-ventilation on disc brakes... :)
make make WRX even happier
useful in supersonic aircraft... conduct the heat away from leading edges much faster than normal.
c'mon, join in... what other real-world apps could this be useful for. if the price can come down, and the production can come up... I can think of a lot more places this stuff would make sense.
... can they install Linux on it?
"Derp de derp."
The article states the foam is 4-5 times better than copper, and 3 1/2 times better than aluminum at conducting heat.
Yet another worthless piece of reporting. I think I'll wait until science news covers this story.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
A high-efficiency heat conductor is one that acts quickly. In other words, when a fast moving atom/molecule hits it, the conductor responds more quickly in absorbing the thermal energy and transmitting it to the ambient environment. A 100% efficient conductor would transmit this energy so quickly that all fast moving atoms would come to a virtual standstill inside the container--in other words, absolute zero.
Practically speaking this never happens. Still, wrapping a really fast conductor around a soft drink will cool it off. But you still wouldn't want to do that because you couldn't pick up the glass--the outer surface is going to be hot.
I worked for POCO Graphite in Decatur, Texas up until 6 months ago. POCO is the only licensed manufacturer of graphite foam (POCOFoam is their name for it). This stuff isn't just good for a heat sink shim - IT CAN EASILY REPLACE YOUR ENTIRE HEATSINK AND FAN! But- heatsinks are only the beginning. POCO has made prototype car radiators out of this stuff that are 6 inches by 8 inches by 1 inch - AND THEY WORK EXTREMELY WELL! To get an idea of just how well POCOFoam transfers heat, check out this video clip http://www.pocofoam.com/images/foam.mov. You will be highly impressed - I guarantee!
I thought, that maybe I was missing something in my vocabulary (english isn't my maternal language), but neither Merriam-Webster nor my Oxford dictionary was able to find more than one meaning of the word:
If you were to create a heat spreader (the chip on the left) as in the old socket 370 celerons and new Pentium III and Pentium IV (the large block of metal protecting the chip die), it would probably be a lot more useful (depending on it's strength of course).
If it is stong enough, it would probably be quite useful as a heatsink as well, although it would probably cost you a bundle at the moment.
But why use it as a shim? What next? Only use money for wiping your butt (don't try this trick with coins. Don't ask!)?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Nope. A shim is generally not thermally conductive (and better damn well not be electrically conductive ...), since it doesn't matter whether it is or not.
Again, wrong. The idea is not to increase the amount of contact surface between the CPU and the heatsink, as this would be impossible to do, unless you made the CPU itself larger -- heat only radiates off of a CPU from the little rectangular core in the middle; the ceramic surrounding the contact point has little to no thermal conductivity. Instead, the idea is to give the heatsink a larger area to which to apply pressure. This means it's going to be more difficult (though not impossible) to chip the CPU core if you're using a shim than if you're not. Shims only became popular with the Athlon Thunderbird chips that were trivially easy to break with a sloppy heatsink install. Since those shims were made out of copper (bad! that's electrically conductive, which means you could very easily short out your CPU), many of the more clueless overclockers instantly thought "copper == cool", and thus assumed that shims were another way to lower their CPU temps by a couple more degrees. They were wrong.
While not the same thing, carbon has been used as a heatsink interface material for years. My DEC Alpha came with a Grafoil pad to use between the processor and the heatsink, in lieu of heat sink paste. It's apparently spongy graphite made into a flexible pad.
"If IE's Windows integration is a monopoly, then I'm all for the removal of Konqueror from KDE."
You got the code, rip it right out sonny boy.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Sure, this stuff is more efficient than copper for conducting heat, meaning it has a low thermal resistance. However, to continue the electrical analogy, I wonder what would be the "thermal current" it could support? That is, how many watts could this material really dissipate? For all we know from the article, maybe if you try to put in more than a few watts per square inch, the stuff melts or catches fire.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Yup, you're right. That's an insane amount of heat....this product won't be cheap.
-ted