Slashdot Mirror
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.
Well, this is either the first great technological breakthrough of the 21st century or this year's cold fusion.
Presumably the possibilities for this are vast - could it be used to make very strong magnets (through high temperature superconductors) a realistic possibility at last?
Of course, given the amount of power (some of) you Americans waste on air conditioning and your (government's?) refusal to acknowledge global warming is real, it is good news for just about everyone - until the oil companies close it down, of course.
We have been workingb on asynchronous chips which slow down when the chip heats up. The problem with having super high heat producing chips and a great big super high enegry sucking heat sink is that the chip will have hot and cold regions. These hotspots will get hotter as the gradient gets larger. The problem is that clocked design will not be able to cope with a small area of the chip being slow. Anly a very localy generated clock can cope with it and slow down the circuit.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
The most important question is the price. Will it be cheaper than refrigerator compressors for example?
Can someone please explain how you Quantum Tunnel in reverse, do the electrons magically get sucked in a shell or something.
And for that matter how you do Quantum Tunneling that results in a -ve gradent less than the energy used to tunnel the electrons in the first place. i.e. More heat is produced tunneling than tunneling looses.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The company is run out of a tax haven. A mere three weeks after they get NASD trading approval, up pops an article on Slashdot - complete with vague but reassuring press release from a big [but likely dumb] name, Boeing. Then you go to their site - KewlChips have lots of vague but reassuring information about their governance and pedigree, and look, kids, you can invest now!
I quote from their Investor Relations page:
"Cool Chips plc common shares were cleared for trading in the United States by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) on 24 April 2002. Quotes are available from www.pinksheets.com under the symbol COLCF. The Cool Chips Technology work is managed out of Europe and we are a virtual company based in the European Union. Your Company is a member of the Borealis Family of Companies, and is incorporated in Gibraltar. Gibraltar law is essentially English law and we are governed by that. We have elected to use Gibraltar GAAP as our reporting standards, as these are the standards of our domicile.
In addition to the Investor Information available for our parent company, Borealis Exploration Limited, links to corporate information specific to Cool Chips plc are located at http://www.coolchips.gi/investor/corpinfo.shtml
Stock quotes can be found at:
Pink Sheets: BOREF COLCF Bloomberg: BOREF COLCF "
Does that sound like pandering to you? It sure does to me, and my wallet is firmly tucked away.
Just remember... their own statement is that they are a virtual company run out of a tax haven. Caveat emptor. Don't throw your SlashDollars away.
Reading their technology explanation, the idea certainly seems reasonable enough! The trick being of course in the manufacturing of the two very close but seperated layers.
If I understood their physics-for-dummies explanation correctly, the principle relies on two metals separated by a very thin gap; a potential difference across the plates encourages tunneling of electrons across the gap, carrying heat with them.
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?
What sort of temperature differentials are possible through a device like this? Is it only limited by mechanical constraints?
Hope these thoughts aren't entirely moronic.
To vaporise that gas it drained the heat-energy from the drink and therefore instantly cooled it.
It's probably cheaper than Coolchip too.
Caveat: I really am Not a Physicist, and am talking with little clue. But I don't think it is as bleak a picture as you describe.
For starters, I thought these weren't necessarily semiconductor based. If I understand the principle correctly, you'd want both sides of the device to behave like metals. 'Hot' electrons would be being replaced by relatively slow-moving electrons from the current source.
Also, if (big 'if') you can do some fancy molecular footwork so that the two layers are held apart by relatively heat-non-conucting struts, then there could still be a fair amount of room to produce a temperature differential before heat conduction back to the cold side caused equilibrium.
Lastly, there's always going to be some radiation-based transfer of heat from the hot side to the cold side, but again that just constrains where the equilibrium point is going to be reached. It's possible that in normal operating range, this effect is quite small.
There a very high correlation between heat and electrical insulation. If it is good enough for electrical insulation, it is good enough for heat insulation. Ball One. If you read it correctly, you'll see that you need electricity. If you think a little, you'll realize it is to pump away those free electrons. No free electrons, no reverse tunneling. Ball Two. Well, if you are not using vacuum those photons won't go far. But most important, half of the photons will go away from the substrate. This would give a resulting 250W/cm^2 dissipation. Ball Three.
Still, a single layer is not all that useful but think of a thick waffle of these. Then you could transfer heat far enough and fast enough that you wouldn't have a heat differential problem.
For those aren't up to speed, here's a quick description on how the cooling works:
Let's say the substrate has a 3 volts gap and you are using a 2 volts battery to push against the gap. Obviously, this is not enough to allow the electron to cross the gap. Now heat is energy also and there's a statistical distribution of this energy between the electrons. All the electrons with 1 eV of heat energy have (1 eV + 2 eV = 3 eV) enough energy to cross the gap, resulting in a 1 eV energy transfer from the cooling side to the heating one.
If the cooling substrate becomes hotter, you can use a lower voltage on the battery since there are enough electrons in the 1.5-2 eV range. If it becomes too hot, this happens with a zero-volt battery meaning the subtrate probably doesn't work anymore.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Let me start by saying that I have nothing to do with the company - I only heard of them this morning.
The claims are quite bold, so it is natural to be skeptical. Someone provided a link to their patents page http://www.borealis.com/technology/patents.shtml which has a lot of issued patents. If this is a scam, then at minimum they started it a few years ago and probably poured over a million dollars into patent fees.
I picked two patents at random, one is by Avto Tavkhelidze of High Energy Physics Institue in Tbilisi in Georgia. Another is by Isaiah Cox of England, which was first applied for in 1996. At a very quick glance, these patents are not nutty crank patents.
Do I think this is real? May be the science works, or may be it does not; but that's just one of their worries. Is the production cost low enough, will the thing be robust enough, how easy will it be to install and use.
They claim to have actually built a Maxwell's Demon. Like all such claims, it is founded on germs of plausibility, and the prospect of beating the thermodynamic game is so interesting that folks line up to play with it. It's hard to imagine that all the objections posted here can be wrong; though perhaps it will turn out that, after you cut through their marketing hyperbole, there's a valid useful nugget of technology that has some practical applications. One hopes that this is what the Boeing geeks have found, and that they didn't get swindled. (It's sad when smart guys get fooled by a scam.) But time will tell, of course.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld