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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
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).
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
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...
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
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.
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