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Ultra Efficient Chip Cooling Passes Boeing Tests
joelgrimes writes "A company called Cool Chips plc is showing off a cooling device that claims unbelievable efficiencies using what they call 'quantum mechanical electron tunneling'. A choice quote from their press release: "A panel of Cool Chips one inch square will provide enough cooling for a refrigerator; a panel about two inches square will have the capacity to provide the air conditioning for a living room". They also mention using them to cool microprocessors. I used to think this company was nuts, but Boeing is making me think twice. Oh, and by the way, they work in reverse to make electricity from heat. Should I sell my baseball cards and buy their stock now, or can an army of slashdotters poke holes in their claims?" Fascinating stuff. Makes peltier coolers look pretty old school. In the press release they claim up to 80% efficiency, compared to 5-8% for peltier coolers and 50% for conventional refrigeration. I will say the cool chips corporate logo is baffling, though.
Just because Boeing is backing CoolChips plc *doesn't* mean the technology or the company is sound.
Big companies like to throw their money around just to make sure they don't miss the 'next big thing'. Often they make terrible mistakes...
Take Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgian speech recognition software company, which Microsoft invested a ton ($40m?) of money in. The Chairman of MSFT Europe was on the board.
Yet when L&H went belly-up in 2000, it turned out 100s of millions of revenues were fraudulent. MSFT was no better at picking a company with solid speech recognition technology that the rest of us.
So, don't assume that - just 'cause Boeing *appears* to be supporting CoolChips - that the company is a good investment.
--- My dad's political betting
So these guys have come with a very efficient heat transfer dispositive... so what?
Think about *any* dispositive of this kind. It moves heat from here (you room, the refrigerator box, the surface of the CPU...) to there (usually the air, or a free water mass). Now, two extreme examples:
Your air conditioner: it colds mainly due to convection and conduction (the air circulates and goes near a cold tube system). Now, no matter how effectively those chips steal heat from air, how much air you can pass over an square inch on a time unit, given the fact it has to be in countach with the refrigerator unit time enough to transfer that heat to it -the chip can be marvellous, still air is not a good heat conductor?
Your CPU: Your CPU is nowadays a heat place. Now you put one of those chips which steals heat from your CPU's one square inch surface very effectively... just to put that heat on the external chip one square inch surface! You still have *exactly* the same problem than rigth now: how do I remove that heat from the colding system? It is still one square inch, it is still within my PC box, it is still very hot (and remember: once all the chip is at the same temperature than the "hot" side, it won't refrigerate no more).
The problem with *all* refrigerating systems is the same: move the heat from where I don't want it *to a place where it can be "pumped off" as fast as it is producing*.
The problem is that the other side of the chip heats up. So what you say? Well in most applications
its no good cooling something only to dump the waste heat a few millimeters away just so it can
leak back into the device/fridge/whatever. You need something to transport that heat away
whether than be a fan or a liquid transport system.
So I reckon these devices (if they work) will be great for largish appliances and PCs but not much
use in your average laptop where there is no room for a fan and just glueing the hot part of the
chip to the casing is asking for trouble (and burnt users).
Quit off topic, but regarding L&H it should be noted that the technology was indeed there.
These guys made great products... But that just wasn't enough for them... So they got into these fraudulent revenues schemes with daughter-companies in distant countries...
Just my 2 cents.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
If the efficiency on these things is at all realistic --80% of Carnot efficiency!!!-- the implications would be staggering. For comparison purposes, the most efficient gasoline engine is currently about 50%, and that is only true for diesel engines on the order of 100,000 horsepower. all I have to say is Wow. Think: efficient solar power, electric cars, air conditioning, superconductivity, asynchronous computers, overclocking Athlons. If there were ever anything to top cold fusion, it would be an 80% efficient Carnot engine.
If the technology works (as pointed out by the press release no cooling has actually been achieved) then it likely will remain far too expensive for the return on energy savings for quite some time. It will have a place in aerospace and defense (typical areas where high cost and short life can be justified with gains in weight and energy savings) but you won't be seeing it in your refridgerator for some time - at least not until they make a cheaper (less efficient) version which can be mass produced and lasts for years.
They, like many companies, have a lot of theory, a lot of calculations, and a lot of patents. Chances are they are hoping to sell it all to someone who has the resources to really try it out. Along with their other 'innovations' it appears that they are an IP company.
-Adam
You can't generate "cold" out of thin air. If one side of this thing gets cold, the other one will get hot. From their website: "Cool Chips plc has devised "Cool Chips" which use electrons to carry heat from one side of a vacuum diode to the other." So you still have to get rid of the heat on the "cool chip", and the hot side will have to dissipate more heat than the cold side absorbs, because efficiency can never be 100%. This means it works like a peltier, just (probably) more efficient.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Even if their claim is 100% true I do have two questions about this tecnology before puting any money in it.
How cheap (or expensive) this chips are?
How long they endure?
If they costs 1000s of dolars and work for a year I would stick to the cooler fan and my good old refrigerator.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
They're still trading over the counter, not on NASDAQ, which makes it more suspicious. I wouldn't suggest putting any money in it unless they actually do get onto Nasdaq. Actually, the press release sounds pretty boilerplate for a small, publicly traded company, though.
I mean, being offshore doesn't necessarily mean anything. A lot of very "respectable" U.S. companies are heading off shore to get the tax break.
Despite what it says they must make laptops run hotter. Adding electricity to something cannot bring a net cooling effect. If one side of this thing gets cooler by removing heat, then the other side gets hotter than the cool side gets cooler. (did that make sense)
Anyway, it is the reason you can't just stick an air conditioner in the middle of the room or leave the fridge door open and expect your house to get cooler. You have to have a heat exchanger outside to dump the heat removed from the cold side and the 20% waste heat that they are quoting.
Maybe they are talking about making the inside of the laptop cool while having a big funky heatsink on the outside which you could fry an egg on...
You're probably right as Gibraltar is a tax haven. However Gibraltar is just a big Rock peninsular at the southern tip of Spain. It is not an island. And if the British and European governments get their way, it won't be a haven much longer, as it will be assimilated into Spain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gibraltar is not an island.
It's a British colony in the middle of Europe: the last residue of the British Empire. Spain and GB are in negotiations about making it a shared territory.
See http://www.gibraltar.gi/history/ for the locals point of view.
IANAP, but I'm sure someone here is: doesn't vibration at the atomic scale in some crystalline medium also act like a particle? Can these guys also tunnel across gaps, or is their weird quantum nature restricted to the single medium they're expressed in? If they could tunnel, I would have thought that as the heat differential across the plates increased, their tunneling would also increase, acting as a break on the process and bringing about an equilibrium situation (temperature differential vs. potential differential.) Or is the mechanism for equilibrium simply black-body radiation across the gap, or similar?
(I was a physicist)
Vibrations if atoms in a solid indeed behave like particles. They're called phononss. Them aswell as the electrons are basically responsible of the heat conduction in solids. Only electrons and other electric particles can tunnel. Phonons are very much like particles but they do need the medium (i.e. the solid) to travel in, where as electrons are not bound by medium.
What I see happening with this system of theirs is a lot of excess heat that has to be taken away once it's on the other side.
People cooling their pcs should remember that their problems are actually quite practical. They have few hundred watts coming out their chasis and that has to dealt with, no matter the actual cooling device next to the cpu. The problem _is_ the CPU producing shit loads.
There are uses for highpower cooling although most physicists these days disregard the problem and use liquid nitrogen or even liquid helium. It simply kills the heat and releases just some gas that isn't harmfull. One can then produce it somewhere else where exess heat is no longer a problem.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
MAJOR CORRECTION!
The polar ice caps melting means the sea level rises and we lose land, and not gain any. That is a very big deal.
Now personally, I am a sceptical enviromentalist and it's perfectly possible this is all entirely normal behaviour for our ecosystem, but what we are doing is absolutely just making things worse.
Now I agree that AC is not a waste, it's damn hot in some places and people would die (litteraly) if it wasn't there.
Also, yes the Kyoto agreement didn't make a lot of sense in the US, because it didn't take in to account how many forests the US plants (or other forms of conservation). In this respect, the Kyoto agreement was fundementally flawed.
BUT, all that said, the US (in general) seems to have less of an 'public awareness' of this issue. And it's something that all countries need to tackle.
Even if the melting of the polar caps is entirely natrual, it's surely fair to except we are all only making things worse, and pretending that the issue doesn't exist is not going to make it go away.
The biggest problem with the standard Bismuth Telluride junction (like in your electric cooler chest, or your CPU cooler) is that the material doing the work has to have two contradictory properties:
The problem is that electrical conduction involve the movement of electrons, which can carry heat with them, so most electrical conductors also conduct heat well. But if you conduct heat, you get leakage from the hot side to the cold side of the device.
And if you make the device less electrically conductive, you increase the heat generated in the device by the electric current, degrading efficiency. The biggest problem with Peltier junction coolers is that for every watt of heat you move, you MAKE ten watts of waste heat.
Now, perhaps with proper microstructuring, you could make a system in which electrons under a potential difference tunnel across a gap, carrying heat without providing a thermally conductive path back to the cold side, and perhaps you could get high cooling efficiencies out of such a device. Granted, you still have to pull the heat off the hot side of the device, but if you could (for example) have the cold side at 20C next to your CPU, and the hot side at 120C exposed to an air stream, you will move more heat into the air stream than you would from the 50C surface of a CPU that was not actively cooled.
So, what they are saying is at least plausable (unlike the "I can move video over three miles of dental floss" crap some folks have fallen for), however the best cons in the world have started from a plausible start.
I won't whip out MY checkbook until I see a real device, in a real setting, moving real amounts of heat, and can poke, prod, and probe it to my heart (and more importantly, my BRAINS) content.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Yes, a big, old technology heat sink would be necessary to draw away the heat just a short distance from the cooling area. The heat is moved only a short distance, even if you believe the article. At that short distance, you would have the same problem of the heat you started with, plus that introduced by the inefficiency of the device, and you've paid someone some money.
It surprises me to read the comments above. Most readers don't seem to have much understanding of the basic issues of science.
This is a hoax. Maybe the press release is the result of someone hacking the Boeing web site. Maybe someone paid a Boeing employee to post it. Maybe some evauluator at Boeing was genuinely fooled.
Note the date of the press release: SEAL BEACH, Nov. 30, 2001. If this were real, we'd be seeing it on TV news stories.
File this story with super-efficient data compression, a story that appeared last year on Slashdot.
Yes, acutally, that would work if you add some heat conductors and a heat sink. Think of it as a really small heatpump.
Heatsource => Chip =>
Conductor to someplace else => another chip =>
Heatradiator(sink, groundpole, space-dongle)
Or even better, you use the hot end as a water heater.
Heat isn't bad; It's just inconviently located.
-Stuart
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
If the ice caps recede, so will glaciers, releasing land for use.
Most glaciers are in mountaine area. Not much use from that aea if the glacier is gone. At least not in relation to the same amount of are in a more asy to farm zone.
It is true that most ice is floating
No this is wrong. Would be interesting from where you got that.
The north polar reagion is only floating ice. So your sample with the ice qube in a glass of water is right, besides the fact that we have in this case "sweet water ice" floating in "salt water". If it melts, the levle rises. (
The south polar reagion is a continent. That continent is a bit bigger than Australia or about 1.5 times the size of the United States. (www.everything2.com)
That continent is covered with a ice cap about 2km to 4 km hight.
Oh, nice, everything2.com even covers that also, and they say the highest ice mountaine is 5km
Anyway, if all that ice would melt the sea level would rise about 100 meters. Of course the global warming is not that fast. So a sea level raise over the next 50 years will only be about 10 meters, bye bye New York
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
P.S. if you go for skiing to Austria or Swizerland you can watch the snow line going up the mountaine each year. A winter 0.1 degree warmer than the year before is 2 weeks less winter holidays or 100 meters higher snow line.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sorry, you're wrong. It's legit.
If your argument is correct, then the thousands of Peltier-cooled devices that already exist, in fact, do not. They're all a hoax.
The whole point of heat exchange in a processor context is to move the heat far enough away so that it does not affect the processor. Who cares if your heat sink, which is attached to the 'hot' side of the cooler, is at 150 Celsius? The metal certainly doesn't. As long as the *chip* stays cool, there ain't a problem.
Granted, it's not gonna make laptops run cooler, but it just might let them run faster.
--nick