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.
The only chip cooling you ever need is vinegar and ketchup. (Oh wait, most of you are Americans and will call those "fries"... Forget I mentioned it)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
from the Boeing press release Boeing has the right of first refusal on this new technology for aerospace applications.
Euh - probably legaleese for saying "it's ours, we refuse to give it others from now on"
Knowledge first. Social contact later.
Maybe that'll cut down on the 120db fan drone in our computer lab. The silence in here is deafening.
Here's the Google cache for those too lazy to find it themselves.
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
COOL CHIPS DISCLOSES APPLICATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS IN HIGH-EFFICIENCY NANOTECH COOLING DEVICES
Refers to COLCF and BOREF
Cool Chips plc
Gibraltar
14 May 2002
Cool Chips plc (COLCF) said that its Cool Chips(tm), wafer-thin discs designed to produce cooling or refrigeration more efficiently than any competing technology, use quantum mechanical electron tunneling as the primary cooling mechanism. The Cool Chip is one of the first transformative technologies to emerge from the nanotechnology revolution.
The Cool Chip technology could eventually replace nearly every existing form of cooling, air conditioning, and thermal management. Prototype devices are being shown publicly for the first time at the Nanotech Planet Conference in San Jose, California, that begins today. The company has not previously disclosed the full scientific basis for its technology.
Because of the inherent advantages in cooling across a gap using electron tunneling, Cool Chips are projected to attain efficiencies much higher than those previously available in cooling systems, and they are much less than 10% of the size and weight of compressors. Cool Chips are modular, and can be packaged in arrays to cool virtually any size heat load.
The company expects its Cool Chip(tm) technology, which has been in development since 1994, to replace all thermoelectrics and compressors for cooling, in applications ranging from electronics and infrared sensors, to computer components, refrigeration, and air conditioning. Cool Chips are on target to have an overwhelming cost advantage.
Cool Chips will enable many new and improved consumer products. They will enable laptops to run cooler, for example, and make possible in-car soda and grocery coolers. 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; and a panel about five inches square will supply enough cooling power to cool an entire house.
Most existing cooling systems use compressors and environment-damaging fluids and are 40-50% efficient. Smaller thermoelectric cooling devices, despite more than $1 billion spent on research, are only 8% efficient. Cool Chips are projected to operate at 70-80% of the maximum theoretical efficiency (Carnot) for cooling.
Cool Chips prototypes are small electronic devices similar in appearance to computer chips. When an electric current is applied, one side of the chip will become cold and the other side hot, as electrons "tunnel" across a 1-to-10 nanometre gap separating the two sides, carrying heat with them. Innate device advantages include high efficiency, solid-state design, silent operation, environmentally friendly materials and operation, and compact size for easy integration.
"We have demonstrated the capability to make multiple prototypes that show a tunneling current in excess of 10 amps, using a wafer area approximately 9 square cm in area," said Isaiah Cox, Cool Chips' president. "This is, by far, the largest tunneling current that has ever been reported across a gap, and we expect Cool Chips to make the first use of this quantum tunneling effect in a primary commercial application."
The tunneling current can be harnessed to provide cooling of very high density. The theoretical heat flux for flat electrodes suspended 50 Angstroms from each other is on the order of 5000 watts per square centimetre. Cool Chips(tm) will be more than adequate for cooling the next generation of microprocessors, which will produce upwards of 100 watts of heat per square centimetre.
Cool Chips are currently in development, and it is expected to take over a year to complete prototypes which demonstrate high output and efficiency. Current prototypes are being used to increase the quantum tunneling, and cooling has not been directly measured to date. Once the tunneling output has been increased to a certain level, our scientists intend to begin increasing cooling output.
An IV curve and other information is now available on the Cool Chips website at http://www.coolchips.gi.
The Cool Chips technology is protected by an extensive patent portfolio. This coverage extends to include a broad array of techniques related to this unique thermal management system, which offers solutions for nearly any thermal management application.
Cool Chips plc, based in Gibraltar, is a majority-owned subsidiary of Borealis Exploration Limited (BOREF) and has 7,281,785 shares outstanding. Borealis' business is reinventing the core technologies used by basic industries, including electric motors, steelmaking, electrical power generation, and cooling and thermal management.
For further information contact:
Chris Bourne
Director of Public Relations
Cool Chips plc
+44 20 8571 5216
pr@coolchips.gi
Forward Looking Statement at http://www.coolchips.gi/fwdlook.shtml
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
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 most important question is the price. Will it be cheaper than refrigerator compressors for example?
From http://www.borealis.com/technology/patents.shtml:
Patent 5981866(StampPE)
PROCESS FOR STAMPABLE PHOTOELECTRIC GENERATOR
Abstract
Manufacture of a photoelectric converter by a photolithographic or stamping process prior to coating with a photoelectrically emissive material is described. This gives an economic and simple means of mass-producing photoelectric converter cells, and in one aspect is analogous to that used for pressing optical discs.
Shoud be able to keep this little puppy cool
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If what they claim is true, why has their server melted?
Some useful google caches:
Main Page
Technology (hype?)
-Berj
which is getting /.ed.
t ml
http://www.coolchips.com/technology/overview.sh
What is Cooling with Electrons?
"Hot" and "cold" are words we use to describe the presence (or absence) of heat. Heat is best described as energy contained within something else. So a cup of hot coffee has more energy than that same cup an hour later, after much of the heat has dissipated.
The energy which makes up "heat" is the kinetic energy of the atoms which carry the heat. So if the atoms in the cup of coffee are very active, the coffee is "hot". If the atoms become less active, the coffee is "cold". And if the atoms get cold enough so that the atoms are no longer in a fluid form, the coffee freezes into a solid.
While atoms in a solid themselves tend to be pretty immobile, the sub-atomic particles within them are always moving. At any temperature above absolute zero, electrons are constantly in motion, spinning around the atom, but also (especially in metals) swapping places with the electrons of surrounding atoms.
Of course, some electrons have high energy, while some electrons have low energy. The low energy electrons are cold, while the high energy electrons are hot.
Cooling with electrons involves encouraging the high energy electrons to escape, bringing in low energy electrons to replace them. It is analogous to removing the loudest people from a party: the party gets quieter.
What makes Cool Chips special?
There are other technologies which use electron migration to reduce heat. These fall under the rubric of "thermoelectrics". These technologies all use special materials and geometries to move the hottest electrons to one side, keeping the coldest electrons at the other.
The biggest problem with thermoelectrics is that while electrons are used to carry heat in one direction, the material itself returns most of that heat through conduction!
Cool Chips are special because the electrons move across a gap -- and that gap, since it is not a solid, is an excellent insulator. Once heat is trapped on one side, it cannot easily return.
How do we get the electrons to move across the gap?
The difficulty in getting lots of electrons to flow across a gap is that electrons do not naturally leave their atoms to go into space. Electrons do jump around a lot (it is called tunneling), but those jumps are pretty short, from one to ten nanometers, or just a few billionths of a meter long.
Researchers at Cool Chips plc have figured out how to get two materials very close to each other so that electrons can tunnel from one material to the next, carrying their heat with them. With the addition of a voltage bias, which encourages the electrons to move in a given direction, the heat is then transferred from one side to the other. And because there is a gap between the two materials, the heat cannot simply flow back!
Why hasn't this been done before?
Thermotunneling has not been done before because nobody imagined that it was possible to get large surfaces areas close to each other without making occasional contact. Cool Chips' scientists not only imagined a way to do it, but we have accomplished this goal and are currently refining our patented process.
Once these devices become commercially available, they will not only revolutionize the industries of refrigeration and cooling, but all of those industries that depend on them.
Who is going to be the first idiot to get their tongue stuck to one of these!?
Baz
Cooling not yet measured? So, the device works in theory, but there might be an unanticipated roadblock ahead which significantly delays or hinders their ability to produce devices that actually cool something. :/
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
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*.
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.
No, it isn't that sinister a concept.
Right of first refusal means that you get a chance to buy something before anyone else does. It is the business equivalent to the concept of having "dibs" on something.
It also does not represent too great a risk on Boeing's part. They aren't obligated to buy this technology. They just have the chance to buy it before anyone else does. While they are certainly paying for this privilege in some manner (maybe the press release is the payment), they aren't jumping in with both feet.
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).
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.
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
Could someone please come up with a reasonable theory on what the hell the dolphin-with-pick-ax logo is supposed to be before my head explodes?
Monstromart: Where shopping is a baffling ordeal
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.
No, it is NOT restricted to the medium they are using. electrons can tunnel through anything, because they are borrowing some needed energy (to get through the barrier) from time, because delta t*E = h_bar...so since the uncertainty in time * energy cannot be less, electrons can borrow some energy and give it back later. The bigger the potential, clearly the less likely it is they will tunnel. also, when u speak of vibration at atomic scale, it is more the OTHER way around: particles at the atomic scale act like waves...that is really the ONLY reason there is quantum tunneling at all!
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
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
So what's the definition of efficiency for cooling devices?
What constitutes "work done" in this case.
Real physicists only please.
To vaporise that gas it drained the heat-energy from the drink and therefore instantly cooled it.
It's probably cheaper than Coolchip too.
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
Well, from what I see California's problems could all possibly be solved! If this chip can do what they say it can (I'm not buying stock yet, but I'll be watching) California's electricity problems may be completely solved, consider the reduction of electricity consumption and the electricity production capibilities and you see where I'm going with this..... Now if it only works.........
If this actually works (big if) strap one onto the CPU of a laptop, while it cools down the processor it converts the heat into electricity. Then use this electricity to power the laptop
Of course there will be some loss of energy so it won't run forever, but it might extend the battery life. Also you could put the fastest prosessors available in a laptop since you don't need to worry (as much) about excess heat and enegy consumption
Cana nyone tell me how much of a laprops battery is used to power the prosessor, and how much of this is released as heat? How efficient would these cool chips have to be before it makes a noticable difference on battery lilfe?
Maybe I shouldn't haave posted this (prior art) and patented the idea instead?
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
So here goes again.
It could work in theory I think, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The electrons could 'borrow' some energy on the cold side, which allows them to tunnel through the gap. They then return the borrowed energy on the hot side. Provided the amount of 'borrowed' energy * the time they borrow it for is less than h (Planck's constant) then this is allowed by physics.
A potential gradient across the gap reduces the chance that electrons can tunnel back in the other direction. You have to provide power to create this potential gradient, which is where the 80% efficient figure comes from.
The company's breakthrough is apparently making this gap with enough area that electrons can move en masse through it, thus providing a large cooling effect.
To make it efficient? and controlable.
The main problem i see is in the transit of the electrons/energy across several atoms etc...
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Given that my living room is rather larger than two square inches, and given that these chips apparently produce a hot side and a cool side, what is the point in saying that a two inch square panel could cool my living room? Surely the other side of this panel would be simultaneously heating my living room. Isn't the problem with all these sorts of coolers the means of getting the heat away from the hot side?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
An article about Chip Cooling, and not a single mention over overclocking yet! Could it be that really nobody got yet the idea of glueing such a "cool chip" back-to-back to a normal CPU, and let it rip?
Say no to software patents.
No, they say it's 80% of the *Carnot efficiency*. The Carnot efficiency is that physical limit to which you refer, and efficiency in heat engines is generally reported as a percentage of the Carnot efficiency. 80% is still huge though.
What kind of current requirements would be necessary to move heat from one surface to another, one electron at a time? Sounds like one would have to move a good number of them per unit time. For instance, a typical Peltier module (a Melcor CP1.4-71-06L is what I have here) has an internal resistance of about 1.7 ohms. Which means that at 8 volts, you're pumping a little less than 5 amps through for a temperature drop of about 50 deg. C. That's what, P=IE, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 watts in! Energy to move the electrons has to come from somewhere. I'd sure like to see the specs on these babies.
science is a religion
Isn't this exactly the same as Maxwell's Demon, which violates the second law of thermodynamics?
Cold chips were the companies claim,
Some said of them "they're insane",
The chips got no colder,
the investors got a tolder,
your stocks worthless, oh what a shame.
Hang on, what is the difference between this and a 2mm thick piece of sheet metal, except for the fact that the sheet metal is 100% efficient in moving heat from one side to the other as it uses 0 current, and produces the same result?
Is it just me, or does this look like a template document where someone missed one of the 'search and replace' terms? E.g. Perhaps Borealis provides this boilerplate text to all of the companies they try this with.
Clerical errors are by no means an indication of anything more sinister. But clerical errors in the stock trading information that a company provides don't really make me feel especially warm and fuzzy.
-Mark
I wondered about this too. So, how about that quantum-cooled fridge? I didn't imagine that radiator being hot enough to fry an egg. I imagined it hot enough to start a fire, degrade the drywall it was backed up against, melt lead, melt steel.
But maybe if each individual level is microscopic, instead of a single wafer with all the elements on it, your quantum fridge or quantum air conditioner is has a pair of panels with dozens of smaller quantum cooling wafers scattered, at intervals, so the heat load wasn't too high at any particlar point.
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So,
take two flat single isomer cristals of a few attoms thick.
on to each add a uniform raised matrix to each (like an egg box).
position so that the gap between the raised points is correct for tunneling (given the correct potential).
provide a even potential between the two crisyals to cause all points tunnel at the sametime (this is the laser bit).
this should cool one side and heat up the other.
repeat until cold enough
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You'd obviously get it stuck as you're refering...
:)
But then on top of that its generating electricity.
Imagine getting your tongue stuck to a 9volt battery.
God spoke to me
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
Ok, guys, I heard that there was this backwoods genius who invented some, uh, "magic" box, that like, makes normal phone lines faster than a T1! Isn't that crazy! We better get in on this now before some major corporation sweeps this deal up!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
They claim to have invented a highly efficient (~80%) Peltier device ("CoolChip") using "quantum electronic tunneling" across a near-perfect temperature insulating "gap" of nanoscale width. They claim heat-transfer capabilities on the order of 500w/cm**2 (theoretically, but there aren't any _measurements_ yet, that they have, er... published).
It's difficult to attack these claims, simply because they haven't _explained_ the physics or materials or construction beyond trendy buzzwords and, by the way, they seem not to have actually _built_ any devices. This is typical of bunco artists hyping seemingly wonderful new technology. See all the "zero point energy" hucksters, for example.
However, a little common-sense physics is enough to demolish this scam. I'd like to hear their answers to the following questions and objections. But, I bet they won't do it.
There is no such thing as a near-perfect (or even really good) temperature insulating solid material - the only pretty good temperature insulation is... a vacuum. Any decent vacuum over a nano-scale gap is going to close the gap, real quick (especially if there is the strong electroforce attraction between negative and positive semiconductors helping); that's Strike One.
Such a Peltier-like device has to work by pumping electrons into the cold side and removing them from the hot side. But injecting electrons into the cold side _excites_ the existing n-doped semiconductor's electron-states, and it's only the rapid migration of those excited electrons away from that layer that removes heat (and the device has to pull away unbound electrons marginally faster than they are injected to provide cooling). It's impossible to extract more electrons than are added without entirely stripping the substrate eventually, and long before that happened you'd see _reverse_ tunneling of electrons into the very depleted cold substrate; here's Strike Two.
Then there's the claimed energy transfer. At the rate of 500w/cm**2, the hot substrate is going to start generating _photons_ (which have no charge, so they're not going to be bashful about moving _back_ across the "insulating" gap) and they will carry... heat; ergo, Strike Three.
Sure, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" [A.C. Clarke], and great technological leaps are desireable. But the only "magic" these people have in mind is moving significant amounts of money from scientifically naive, greedy, and gullible investors into their own pockets. But, it were ever thus: caveat emptor.
Is it just me or does this distinctly bring back Bitboys Memories (TM)?
A new chip that does something so mindblowingly amazing... etc.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
2 plates separated by a very small gap is a capacitor. Capacitors store energy. If you charge one up you deliver energy to it and generate heat. When a capacitor is dis-charged it loses energy and if allowed to equilibrate with the ambient temperature it will end up colder than room temperature. For those looking for a fairly compact way to cool something to liquid nitrogen (LN) temperatures, Ortec EG&G produced a device to cool large Ge Diodes to LN temps for use in gamma ray spectroscophy. I beleive it used Peltire devices and fans. For the record LN is cheaper and easier to use, but more bulky.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
70-80% of the maximum theoretical efficiency (Carnot) for cooling.
Just so everyone is aware, in thermodynamics the Carnot engine is not a 100% efficient engine. Actually, depending on a few variables, the carnot engine can be incredibly inefficient.
Stating that the efficiency is 70-80% of the maximum theoretical efficient (Carnot engine) for cooling doesn't mean that much, since it doesn't fit the equation we all think about.
70-80% = Energy Out/Energy In
Instead we get
70-80% = Energy Out/(Energy In * Carnot Efficiency)
Since |Carnot Efficiency| 1, we end up with a artificial increase in the actual efficiency of the engine.
I would personally like to see the results of the actual efficiency, not this skewed statistic.
.....Marvin Mouse.....
(Math, CS, Physics, Psychology Undergrad)
~ kjrose
Wasn't there something a few months ago about the S.E.C. creating fake companies with glaringly obvious problems (read above, someone pointed out about the offshore tax shelter etc) pandering for investments, with the warning of "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" ?
This sounds alot like those, only a little bit more complicated because it involves boeing. Think it's possible they would get a company like boeing involved to pull a big enough hoax to give everyone a shock out of being retarded?
-Jeff
They only claim 70-80% of Carnot efficiency, not absolute 70-80% efficiency. I.e. this will not be better then the ideal heat cycle device and approximately on par with traditional macroscopic cooling systems like refregirators. Of course, being small, electric powered and having no moving parts is a plus.
The person is right, you need to sink the heat away, but so do you with ANY cooling device, the heat dissipates indoors for a fridge, outdoors for AC.
The idea is you wind up with the same amount of heat, just rearranged. Peltiers have a bimetallic junction, which acts as a diode of sorts. A diode will cool on one side, and re-emit the heat at the other. Small effect, but get enough surface area and you have something. The battery op coolers have these things. How they actually work is any dissimilar junction electron needs to overcome a barrier, and the energy it uses normally comes from the voltage applied. Instead, peltiers use the raw thermal energy at the junction gap(the - side) to go to the + side, picking up energy. When they recombine at + side, energy is released as heat.
Big drawback is most junctions don't take kindly to being heated on either side, so you need to sink them quick.
This seems to be way more efficient, either not allowing an electron to 'get lucky' and jump over an impurity, or has to continually pick up more thermal energy on the way over, or has a ridiculously efficient manufacture process at nanoscale, and can afford to get just the right material thickness(1-10nM)
my 2c adjusted for inflation...
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
I'm not 100% positive, but let's call it at 99.5% I don't think that logo is of a dolphin at all, rather I beleve that to be a whale, the snout is not at all long enough to be a dolphin, and the proportion of tail to body is more whale like than dolphin like. Or maybe I'm just crazy because I guess it does'nt really matter what the damn thing is, the logo is still funky as all hell.
Um, yeah.. I used to work there and um, yeah, and we did some really awesome things.
Um, yeah, this company is for real guys!! Invest now... Um, and I remember setting up this cooling network, it was so efficient, those 80% numbers are actually on the conservative side. And um, let me see. Yeah, we did all sorts of experiments, this techonology works so friggin well I can't even believe it myself. It's real guys. Um, send money if you want to make millions!
They may have cool chips, but when Slashdot makes their site SlashHot they apparently can't handle it.
Miko O'Sullivan
I've heard stories of people's teeth shattering in the winter time by drinking coffee too fast.. I'd imagine a similar loss of structural integrity would occur the instant you powered up such a device. It would cool down so rapidly that the material would shatter.
Just as theory, tho. Hope its legit.. Imagine the implications in how cars are made.
Bowie J. Poag
Could someone please come up with a reasonable theory on what the hell the dolphin-with-pick-ax logo [coolchips.com] is supposed to be before my head explodes?
Maybe it's a hammerhead and a sickle.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I took a look at thequarterly and yearly statements on their Investor Information pages. Their entire expense over the previous year consisted of $32400 in administration fees (which I think is rather a lot), and nothing else. No R&D at all. All the development is apparently being done by their parent company (Borealis Technical), and the entire share capital of Cool Chips is lent to Borealis Technical, with no interest rate and no terms for paying it back.
It looks like investing in Cool Chips will get you a piece of this loan, not a piece of the technology. I suspect that this is exactly why the company was set up. I also note that if Cool Chips folds, then Borealis Technical will be free of the exclusive licensing agreement, and it will still have all the money and the technology.
Of course, none of this is conclusive. I just wouldn't invest in this company.
require extraordinary wads of cash money.
As experience has shown - suckering a major company with X does not mean X is true.
That said, actually, I believe this could work. The "efficiency" claim, however, is somewhat bogus. Quoth their webpage:
to a projected 70-80% of the maximum (Carnot) theoretical efficiency for heat pumps. Conventional refrigerators operate at up to 50% efficiency and current thermoelectric systems (Peltier Effect) operate at 5-8% efficiency.
The Carnot efficiency is not 100%; it is (Th-Tc)/Th x 100%. Th is the temp of "hot" half of the engine cycle and Tc is the cold. Both are in kelvin. So, if your car engine runs at 400K (boiling water) on the compression stroke and 300K (freezing water) on the expansion stroke the maximum efficiency you can theoretically get is 25%.
Now, they seem to be comparing the percentage-of-theoretical efficiency that their device gets with the actual efficiency of other devices. The upshot is that I believe refrigerators also run at about 80-90% of the Carnot efficiency, which is 50% actual efficiency, but I might be making a mistake.
I suppose this maps somehow to a total kinetic energy operator for the individual electrons they are moving (1 minute chemistry - heat is "thermal motion", the degree to which particles are bouncing around. Every "observable" feature of a particle - position, kinetic energy, momentum, and so on - is actually "random", and is related to the "wave function" of the particle, which is a function that tells you the probability of finding the particle at any given position, by an operator, the position operator is the number 1, which is itself a function that maps from a set of algebraic functions to a set of algebraic functions. The math for these operators is hoary as all hell, not analytically soluble, and they can generally only be dealt with pproximately/computationally.)
Clearly - and I'm talking about the second law of thermodynamics, here - they can't actually convert environmental heat into an electrical potential. A heat differential, on the other hand, could very well be done, so they might be usable (in the long run) as a way to generate electricity while venting waste heat from nuclear reactors and the like.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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.
I rarely comment on global warming or other environmental issues, as this is a religion to some people. You cannot use facts to argue with a religious zealot. Still... in college one of my professors was a former NASA scientist, who pointed out the following: something is killing the ozone layer, no doubt about it. The environmentalists said it was freon, and now the UK (the same UK that is part of the "more socially responsible than the US" EU) is making it damn near impossible to get rid of old fridges as a result. But, the ozone layer is in the stratosphere... AND FREON IS MUCH, MUCH HEAVIER THAN AIR! How did it get up there, greenpeace activists? Any ideas? Now, other chemicals can kill ozone... chemicals that are very common in volcanic eruptions. You know, the kind that eject those chemicals straight into the stratosphere... What did Mt. Pinatubo do to the ozone layer? Google it yourself... zealots, and their blind, annoying, holier-than-thou stupidity, are truly maddening. We only need to combine monotheism with the far left environmental movement, maybe throw in some of the "animal rights" activists/terrorists/general loonies, and we'll have a REALLY dangerous movement! I might start it myself! Give me some money, you've got smoggy thetans!
"Should I sell my baseball cards and buy their stock now.." well, the sites down and thus they can't handle a simple little Slashdot flood.
Any company that can't handle the slashdot effect isn't worth buying stock in
BTW. here's Google's cache of their site's main page
BRAVO!!!!! I'm glad to hear a geek (I usually find geeks farther to the left, and arguing for the environmentalists, etc...) speak some reason about the whole environmental situation. The earth has been around a whole lot longer than any animals, and I'm sure that we can't destroy the planet in a couple centuries.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Um, so what exactly is the operating temperature range of these Cool Chips?
[I'm hoping it's not, oh, 2e-6 K<T<3e-6 K, or 20 C <T<20.1 C.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You struck first with Chuck Norris. It was self-defence. ;-)
RMN
~~~
Sounds interesting? That ain't nothing! The same company has a revolutionary new motor.
Can a lightweight Brooklyn Bridge be far behind? Investors wanted!
You say that it's not life or death, but it is!
h tml
;) (HHOJ)
HUNDREDS of people die in hot weather in the US each year due to heat stroke!
From http://www.stayinginshape.com/3osfcorp/libv/e09.s
he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say each year more people in the United States die from extreme heat exposure than from hurricanes, lightening, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined. Over the past two decades, at least 7421 deaths that occurred in this country were attributed to excessive heat exposure. On average, approximately 300 people die each year from exposure to heat.
People used to a hundred years ago too, but we didn't have TV, and the distribution of news papers was not what is now, so no one really noticed unless it happend in there local area.
If you turned off the A/C in Florida for 12 months I'd wager that you'd get at least a few hundred extra dead wrinklies!
To address your point's specifically:
The goldminers of Western Australia didn't have AC for 15
True - but were all a bunch of convicts and nobody cared
As for India, well it's much more lucious (as apposed to being a dustball). As for places that *are* dustballs (like parts of Africa) well you got me there.
It's possible that you just get used to the heat if you grow up in that sort of climate, or that people just die all the time and it's not reported (after all there is an extreamly high mortallity rate all over Africa).
uh huh. well in theory if you converted heat to electricity you could dispose of the electricity pretty easily. your analysis considers a device that only moves energy around, not converts it.
that said, this looks like a hoax..but theres always the small possibility it could be real.
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
Oh I really hope your post is a deeply ironic humourous one, sessamoid. I notice all your examples are from the USA.
Having travelled to India, Spain, several other hot countries, I've seen a lot of architecture designed to work with the temperatures: narrow alleyways which are always in shade, houses with thick insulating walls and small windows, air ways through the houses to channel slight breezes into cooling air flows. These things work. These things have been working for hundreds if not thousands of years.
I believe you are refering to architecture and town planning dependant on artificial cooling techniques: big, open pavements exposed to the sun, large glass and steel buildings with huge windows, big doors facing into the sun.... Also check out people's life styles. Remember Rudyard Kipling's famous line 'only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun'. If you're in India or the southern Mediterranean, people get off the streets by 11 in the morning. It's just the crazy tourists wandering around out there. Everybody else is working or relaxing out of the sun in the nice cool shaded buildings. If you want to see real genius, check out the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (and I am sure there are many other fine examples).
Please tell me your email was one of those 'wind up the dumb rednecks' style postings...
yeah I was a bit superficial at the end there.
;) (HHOJ)
:)
True - but were all a bunch of convicts and nobody cared
hmm, you should maybe read up on the transportation thing sometime. Many were simply debtors or minor petty criminals (few loaf of bread or a few pair of socks). Transportation was a tool of the overpopulated and overworked inner cities of the new Industrial England to clear out the chronically poor. Hundreds/Thousands died on their way. Ships full of women were used as not much more than mobile forced brothels taking twice to three times as long to make the journey as the male boats as they stopped for longer in each of the ports to provide relief for the British Servicemen stationed around the world.
We have a museum [The Galleries of Justice (bah flash only)] here in Nottingham, England about it and other aspects of our inherited justice system. The sinister debtors prison is open for visiting and makes for a sobering afternoon.
/me is sweating, it's so hot here (maybe 20degrees
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Hey, no need to use such foul language! Belgium is the most unspeakably rude word in the Galaxy.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Check out the same companies claims on the PowerChip -- a heat-to-electricity conversion device on the same principle. I am not even close to competant enough in physics to evaluate the truth of their claims, but if the CoolChip is real, and the PowerChip is real, then stacking the two would offer a way to pull heat, then convert it to electrical energy to feed back into the device. (Yes, I know it's less than 100% efficiency. In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.) It'd be a bit like the alternator in a car, converting part of the kinetic energy back into electrical to initiate the whole process again. Reminds me a bit about a story of a motor that produced electricity from atmospheric static. ;)
I only had two semesters of physics, so I can't solve this myself, but wouldn't the hot side get damned hot? All the heat in a living room coming through two square inches?
If this isn't this year's cold fusion, I see lots of options for use:
1) computers, especially where silence is useful. Ever been inside a software-based recording studio?
2) The refrigerator has already been brought up.
3) Tankless water heaters are a really obvious use here.
4) 80% is amazingly better than my heat pump. I have an older, large house. Mount a set of these as a single windowpane in each room, use bluetooth (too far, actually)/802.11b/X10 (although from their popup ads I really don't want to use X10 gear) wireless to control individual rooms and zones, with the old HVAC unit primarily relegated to air circulation in the house, smoothing out the pointsource effect.
5) heating & air conditioning on cars is noisy and a load on the engine, and therefore costly in gas mileage and engine life. Ever see those solar-powered fans that mount in your rear car windows, to ventilate your car when it's sitting in the summer sun? Mount some of the ultracoolerchips like that as a retrofit to every car out there. For newer or custom cars, you can remove the heater/AC unit from the dashboard entirely..
I presume that you spell potato this way since your former VP did...
Myth. Fact is that former US VP Dan Quayle was substituting for a school teacher who had made out a spelling lesson plan with a mistake. Quayle merely followed the plan.
To summarize: British "chips" == American "french fries." American "chips" == British "crisps." Geek "chips" == semiconductors. BUT notice that Pringles® potato crisps are called "crisps" worldwide.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"India isn't blessed with AC all over the place and yet the hot streets aren't littered with burnt corpses."
t h_asia/ newsid_1991000/1991215.stm
How about some right here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/sou
That was in today's news. 450 dead in Indian heat wave.
The president of CoolChips is also the president of Chorus Motors, another Borealis company. Googling him reveals a number of references. Here's an interesting one... http://www.memagazine.org/mepower01/5thharm/5thhar m.html
I too heard this some time ago, but I believe it was dropped because the harmless gas in question was a either a strong greenhouse gas or a destroyer of ozone.
btw. it's Corus steel (I know, it's a very silly name)
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
If I'm not mistaken, isn't quantum tunneling extremely inefficient? I've seen it used to carry an audio signal "faster than light" (according to those conducting the experiments) but the signal degredation was pretty bad due to the fact that on the quantum level, everything is a simple matter of chance. Some of the particles being manipulated behave as expected, and many more do not.
The fact that they haven't even begun to actually try cooling anything suggests to me that this is this week's vaporware and next week's laughware.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
>Well at least no American I know has ever put a "fag" in his mouth.
i guess you're not in new york or san francisco.
If indeed these claims are correct, and the chips can be made reasonably affordable, you are talking about a revolution.
1. Cheap, energy efficient refrigerators and air conditioners that slash energy use at a time when we need to think about global warming.
2. Radically increasing efficiency of combustion engines by converting waste heat into electricity for use in hybrid-electric vehicles.
Sounds too good to be true, or at least I will keep my skeptical wits about me.
Oddly enough, some people are still holding out some hope for this company that has yet to give any definitive proof of this 'perfect compression.'
If anyone has any updates they wanna post, I'd be interested to see if they're actually planning some peer review stuff in the near future.
they work in reverse to make electricity from heat
So strap one of the little buggers to the chip, convert the heat to electricity and we get a bonus of reduced total power consumption.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
This is bullshit.
Think of the heat capacity of the air in your house and then think of concetrating all that heat in a 5x5 inch square plate less tyhan 1mm thick.
I'm not a physisist but that thing would start glowing white hot when the inside temperature was high.
Why don't they say that you can cool your house with a miniature black hole instead?
--
Can't buy what I want because it's free.
...Boeing supporting some research in the 1970s which purported to find an ability of professional psychics to predict or control the results of quantum mechanical observations.
You see, if observation causes the collapse of the wave function, an observer should be able to affect the results of his experiments. So, if you have a PETA psychic running the Schroedinger's Cat experiment, you'll have fewer dead cats.
Right?
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
W/Qh=(Th-Tc)/Th for a machine that converts heat to work
Qh/W=Th/(Th-Tc) for a heat pump that uses work for providing heat at a useful temperature (where the absorbed heat at Tc is "free" and not counted)
Qc/W=Tc/(Th-Tc) for a cooling device
The third (and not the first) case is relevant here. Note that the efficiency is strongly dependent on Th so cooling is much cheaper for small temperature differences.
Cat-shaped Barcode Scanner Passes Radio Shack Tests
Anybody want a peanut?
At first I thought it was a dolphin jumping in front of the sun getting whacked in the ribs with a baseball bat. Or is it maybe just a combination of the two universal symbols of cooling - a dolphin holding a pickaxe?
Obscure.
Myth: CFCs cannot reach the stratosphere because they are heavier than air.
Fact: Air in the lower atmosphere (which extends far above the stratosphere) moves in masses, not as individual molecules. A number of studies have found CFCs and the products of their breakdown in the stratosphere (Rowland, EPA).
Myth: Volcanoes and other natural sources contribute much more chlorine than CFCs to the ozone layer.
Fact: Chlorine compounds from natural sources are soluble, and so are washed out of the atmosphere. CFCs, by contrast, are not soluble and so are able to reach the stratosphere. A number of studies have shown that the majority of chlorine in the stratosphere comes from man-made chemicals (Rowland, Taubes, Russell et al, EPA).
Yep.. this is the one I'm looking for, it's going to go up with all the market hype and media, every idiot is going to invest so buy now and sell early .. you could easily double or triple your money on this one..
just be warned.. it is a flip stock.. don't hold too long!
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.
The gap can prevent heat from migrating back to the cool side through conduction or convection, but radiation (infrared light) can still jump the gap. The hotter the hot side gets, the more heat will radiate back to the cold side. So the efficiency of the system would be inversely proportional to how hot the hot side is allowed to get. Just using a simple heat sink/radiator might ruin the efficiency of the system.
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
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
Do you piss on your living room carpet every day
Yes. I also drive an AMC. Pollution ahoy!
--saint
Clearly, it will be a Mac OS X user, after Apple starts to use these for processor cooling and some confusion about what Steve meant when he said the new systems were 'lickable'...
They did not test hardware--there is no hardware to test. This device is years (at best) from being manufactured
The impossible is easy. It's the unfeasible that poses the problem.
"Borealis" refers to the Arctic regions of the world. The "dolphin" is actually a Beluga whale (no dorsal fin, funny shaped head). Belugas are native to the cold waters of the Arctic and near-Arctic. You see where I am going with this?
You're missing the point. The article talks about aerospace applications. In aerospace, you're given a budget of space, weight, power, and cooling air to implement a function. You spend a lot of time making tradeoffs to get as much functionality, reliability, and speed in that budget. Devices like copper heat pipes are used to move heat from hot spots to the cooling air. If this is lighter, cost becomes less of an issue.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Which shows a basic lack of knowledge of thermodynamics. Even assuming the device works, how is the heat in the room going to get concentrated in a space two inches square so that it can be removed? This quote is designed to make it seem so simple - everyone would like an aircon unit that small - but it would only be able to extract energy from a tiny bit of the room. It would need a rather inconvieniently large metal plate (at least) to actually cool something the size of a room.
Thats even before we ask where they're exhausting the heat to... 50Angstroms away?
Now, why would they want to make it seem much more convinient and it could possibly be...
according to the CIA world factbook luxembourg has the highest per capita GDP in the world. US is second by a couple of hundred dollars ($36.4k Vs $36.2k gdp/per capita)
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Ive not been able to get to the site yet, due to its /.ed state, but - heat can only be moved it never dissapears, as you cool your processor it heats air and so heats the room. No one has commented on how the heat is despersed (as far as i can tell) so id say this might not work.... Also if this is a mirical heat reducer are we gonna be able to afforde it? I think im just gonna get my self a watter cooler with deionised watter its probly cheeper....
"Welcome to Cool Chips plc. We are currently experiencing high traffic volumes (thanks, Slashdot) which may result in slow access times. Your interest is appreciated; On Monday we will be updating our site to address some of the questions that have been raised. If you are not automatically redirected to our site, ENTER HERE." Seems like they'll also be answering some objections mentioned here...sounds good. Who knows, maybe it IS going to be time to open the wallet? Let's wait 'till their answers are in...
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Ok, ok. It's obvious to all of us that this technology doesn't just zap heat. Nobody ever claimed that. What they're saying is that they've found a very efficient way to pull heat away from a small area. Yes, you will require an old style heat sink to get rid of that heat in the end. But if there's a better method than liquid cooling to get the heat away from my CPU, I'm all for it. If they can make an air conditioner that requires less power I'm all for that, too. I for one am excited about it.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
Actually, I think the logo gives the company some real credibility. This looks like a logo created by old-school engineers, not some dotcom IPO slick with marketers and graphic designers. If you spent much time around engineers in the 70's and 80's, this logo should feel very familiar.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
I see allot of people excusing this company of either not being real or not actually having this technology. I propose we try and set up a moderated question interview with them were the top 10 questions get submitted. I really think that if this could hit the mainstream in the next 5 years you would see all kinds of positive implications. Regards, Chad S
Laters, Shmac
when there's icicles hanging from your heat sink and your CPU monitor reports 1800 degrees celsius.
No, this is different. Capacitors rely on electrostatic charge seperation, these devices reply on quantum tunneling. Capacitors use an insulating layer as the plate seperator, these devices use an actual void as the gap.
They have a technical decription on their site for more info.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If these "cool chips" work, they could be used to cool AIR that is flowing over a circuit / chip. This would avoid hot / cold spots.
Something being "real easy to test" does not make the test accurate or significant.
In your discussion, you're talking about volume. However, the relevant topics are not volume, but density and mass. Objects 'float' when they displace an amount of the fluid (water) with a mass equal to their own. In other words, a 100 ton iceberg floats when it raises the water level by whatever volume 100 tons of water is.
So, the iceberg in a solid state will raise the water level by 100 tons of water (divided by the area of the pool and all that). When you melt the iceberg, you have 100 extra tons of water... so an equal rise.
It should be noted that this is primarily applicable on the north pole, where the ice is actually floating. Antarctica, being an actual land mass, has ice that is not currently displacing sufficient water to float.
I haven't seen too many people here look at the patents they have on their site to get an idea as to what they are doing. They seem to be using microfabricated "pits" on the surface facing the gap to generate destructive quantum wave interference thus encouraging tunneling. They also have developed a method for producing the 5-50 nanometer gaps between the surfaces that they need. Also, the materials they reference frequently are interesting, especially diamond (via deposition I assume). I wonder if they are doing something with carbon nanotubes or buckyballs?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Airplanes don't need to dump heat out using fancy chips - they can just take cold air in. Which I think they already do.
:).
I think it'll probably be useful for satellites and other spacecraft. I believe Boeing makes those.
When you're in space, there's a vacuum, you're stuck with radiative cooling - can't do convective cooling, and conductive cooling takes you to the surface and then it's radiative cooling. You can do evaporative cooling, but you'll run out...
These chips could help make the radiative cooling more effective. Probably in combination with heat pipes and all that - because the chips seem to be thin, so you still need stuff to transfer heat over distances. In summary, no moving parts, smaller heatsinks, improved cooling = smaller, lighter satellites = cheaper launches. Whoopee
For household cooling, it's likely you'll still be pumping coolant around. But maybe you only need a 40 watt motor now, instead of a 1000W motor!
Link.
First we got flat screen monitors, now we'll have flat A/C units sitting in our window frames. What next, a flat car? That would be a flying carpet, right?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I didn't post early enough, so this'll probably
be invisible, but what the heck.
The device can't work because the main source of heat conduction in metals is electrical conduction. "Huh?" you ask. Well, heat is just incoherent kinetic energy. Metals and other conductors conduct electricity because electrons are free to wander all over the material. But those electrons don't just carry electric charge -- they also carry kinetic energy. Even incoherent kinetic energy.
With a few exceptions (like diamond), things that are strongly electrically conductive tend to be strongly heat conductive as well, because the electrons carry heat around as they shunt around the material. That's the fundamental limit for Peltier coolers: the better the Peltier cooler conducts electricity, the more freely the electrons can travel and the more freely they exchange heat between the two sides of the dissimilar-metal junction.
Contrariwise, the more poorly the junction conducts heat, the harder it is to push enough electrons through it -- and the more inefficient it gets! So Peltier cooler designers are stuck between a rock (thermal conductivity causing losses) and a hard place (resistivity causing heating).
The problem with this device is that it still suffers from the same problem that Peltier junctions do: the charge carriers are electrons, and they have to be able to travel freely through the device. Short of some kind of Maxwell's Daemon kind of filter in the short tunneling gap, they have the same problem because the electrons that tunnel through the gap will themselves carry heat.
Their PDF document implies that the electron-carried heat is minor compared to something called "direct conduction", but in fact the reverse is generally true in metals, and they don't seem to discuss much the heat carried by the charge carriers. (I admit I just skimmed the document)
A supercooler ain't nothing! The same company has a revolutionary new motor.
Can a lightweight Brooklyn Bridge be far behind? Investors wanted!
If they can make it in the form of a flexible film I can finally get a shirt that won't make me sweat in August! Just think, air conditioned undies!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I wonder if they can slap some of those chips on some of these postings.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"The theory is: If the ice caps recede, so will glaciers, releasing land for use"
And what happens when the ice starts to return and you've built Antartic Disney World already?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Everyone seems to be commenting that, oh you're just moving the heat plus 20 % somewhere else, so this doesn't really mean anything. Bullshit, of course heat cannot be simply destroyed, but does that mean the radiator in your car in useless.
This device obviously isn't going to subtract from the total amount of heat inside a closed box, but neither does my cpu fan. Does that mean I should take if off my cpu and watch my athlon fry itself is 8 seconds?
The whole point of cooling is to move heat from one place to another. I've they've found a good way to do this it is important. they sound overly optimistic about the efficiency of their device, but realize that a device that could do what they say this on does would be very useful.
Please think in terms of the rate of heat transfer between a cpu & heatsink instead of the total amount of heat inside the case. Your cpu only care about how hot it is, and not how hot the heatsink attached to this device would get. At some point you hit a limit with normal cooling. Once you have a connetion to the cpu with the best thermal conductivity, and a heat sink big enough to stay very close to room temperature, you aren't going to be able to get the cpu any cooler without putting something colder than room temperature on the cpu. this will mean more heat is sucked out of the cpu, so you'll beed a bigger heatsink to handle that (and any heat generated by the device) but with that bigger heatsink, you CAN make the cpu cooler that it would have been without such a device.
I want one. And yes, I would use it to cool beer.
Life is too short to proofread.
I thought the person drinking it was the one who ended up releasing the gas?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The real secret to staying cool in these places is that the food is so good you never leave the shaded restaurants.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Only in America does no mean yes, pissed means angry, and cursing doesn't actually mean bringing on a curse!
Or something to that effect.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I think Homer Simpson said it best:
I am a card-carrying skeptic. Show me.
To anyone who might have allowed the thought of investing in this company cross their mind... First of all, the company is incorporated in Gibraltar? WTF??? What kind of company incorporates in a disputed British territory off the coast of Spain??? Secondly, it's traded in PINK SHEETS!!! The lowest under-link of the investment food chian. You might as well go ask one of those guys on the street corner holding a sign that says "The end is near" if you can invest in his concept. Lastly, they couldn't make any firm claims on how well the technology actually performs...just a bunch of "projections". Hmmm, I wonder if I could incorporate in some offshore territory and then put up a spiffy website with a bunch of "projections" to get people to invest in my pink sheet company? :P
Just my $0.02...
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$0.04
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$0.08
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$0.16
***ching***ching*** ...
Your point, that you're only drawing the heat away to another area a small distance away plus the inefficiency is absolutely correct. However, that's how a traditional heatsink works, and its absolutely valid. Thermal flux is based on the surface area of contact. If the new heatsinks were designed with this miracle material so the bottom fits the chip (144mm square) and the top is 288mm square, then you've doubled the area that heat can be dissipated, probably giving you a cooling efficiency increase of 50% (not 100% because nothing in the thermal world is 100% efficent). Now, isn't 66 degrees C better than 100???
Beware physics like you would the Force - it can be used for good or for evil!
Fuck you. If you're Brit ask your Mum and Grandmum who fed them during WWII and gave up thousands of lives and millions of dollars to do it. If you're on the continent ask who helped turn back two German dictators, fed Berlin with an airlift, and stood up against the Russians until they folded. Not to invade and take over, but to see to it that they didn't. Ask yourself who'd you expect to do it all again.
So fuck you. It's none of your damn business if I run an airconditioner in the summer. You'd do the same if your cesspool had enough energy.
Why does WHOIS say that .gi is an invalid tld?
.tv is a valid tld.
.tv domian is for the Republic of Tuvalu, and .gi is for Gibraltar. Why should WHOIS treat these domains differently?
At the same time, it says that
The
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It is just that they have found a version of Maxwell's demon. The electrons in a metal are considered to be somewhat free and bounce around in what is called an "electron gas". Some will be going fast and some slow in a distribution called a Maxwell distribution. It is somewhat like a Chi square with a longer tail that gets longer the higher the temperature. Now those electrons on the fast side near the surface of the metal can pop out for a little distance but get pulled back by electronic attraction. Consider two metal surfaces very closely spaced. If their temperature is the same the Maxwell distribution of both is the same and as many electrons will go one way as the other. Now apply an electronic potential of just one vote over a gap of a nanometer. The electronic field potential is equivalent to a few billion votes per meter, which will highly bias the distribution of the tunneling toward the positive side. As the electrons that tunnel are the fast ones and the fast ones carry high kinetic energy there will be a net energy flow toward the positive pole. The negative side will have its distribution cut off the top, which will, in bulk, appear as a lower temperature and the positive side will have its distribution augmented at the top which will appear, in bulk, as a higher temperature. The electrons coming in at the electrical connections will be following the standard Maxwell for that temperature, so they will have an "average temperature". The real trick will be to create a device rigid enough to maintain a gap with an electrostatic attraction that could be in the tons per square inch range. I am not sure even diamond would be rigid enough.
As long as we are on the topic of baffling logos, I've always wondered about this one: Sherwin William Paint. It is a can of red paint being poured over a globe. The can has the initials "SWP". Motto: Cover the World.
Some artist was having some fun with the management over at Sherwin Williams. I wonder if they have a jingle set to the Internationale?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So, modulate Iforward and make your fridge talk, play Bach, or tunes as well. Useful? Probably not but fun?
I thought everybody knew.
You are probably posting AC because you are joking and you don't want us to bug you about this, but we don't want to confuse anyone. Heat is never converted to electricity. Temperature differentials are.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. "panel about five inches square will supply enough cooling power to cool an entire house." I wonder what my light bill would be to power this thing.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
A red hot heat sink will transfer more heat to ambient air with less surface area and less CFM. :)
Of course, 800 degree air has it's problems too
So we plant enough trees to absorb all the CO2 released by burning fossil fuel. Aside from the fact that this would (in time) result in a shortage of arable land for anything else, it still remains that plastics can quite easily be made from oil, but I've never seen a viable method of making them from trees.
- Rob
Couldn't you just throw some grit in between the electrodes? That won't totally keep them from touching, both touch the grit, but it would keep 99.9% of the two surfaces from touching.
That's what I was wondering. My fridge has several square feet of cooling area. All that heat coming out of 1" square would be quite a hot square.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Notice the HHOJ (Ha Ha Only Joking) at the end ;-)
;-)
And anyway I'm a Scotsman, so what do I care if a bunch of Englishmen get farmed off to Austrialia
Seriously, I know bit about it already - didn't know about that Museum though, will definately pay it a visit next time I am in Nottingham, cheers!
PS: It's 27 hear in London, wearing shorts in the office, whoohoo!
HHOJ (Ha Ha Only Joking)
hehe 10 yrs in BBS & Internet and i thought HHOJ wtf does that mean!
what do I care if a bunch of Englishmen get farmed off to Austrialia
Australians note that there are probably more Scots in Australia than in Scotland.
I do appreciate the joke but it's one of my pet peeves in the world. A direct attack by the ruling elite on the poorest people. Made poor by the industrial revolution that empowered that elite.
My own family was a victim of the Scottish clearances *and* the transportations.
I stood in the dock in the museum (the museum is inside the former Crown Court of Nottingham) and went through a mini mock trial of one of the Luddite rioters from 1831 and then proceeded to tour the remand cells from whence prisoners were transported / moved to other prisons etc.
My character was hung until dead on the steps outside.
History teaches much about the human spirit. I wish more people were interested in it.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Company Counts On Hot Sales For Smaller and Cheaper Chills
By Jack Mason
Small Times Correspondent
See this explanation for some cautionary tales; it's not exactly the same, but you'll get the gist.
Someone has done their physics homework well and got a real patent (yes, I looked it up at the The US Patent office) apparently on the strength of some nano-technobabble. Jeepers.
So, now Mr. Dolphin, tell us how much power it takes to cool our chips?
As with all global climate effects, sea level is not a simple homogenous model. Here's a scholarly article that explains some of the variables. Things are not as settled as they appear in the greenpeace fundraising letters.
h tm
http://www.co2andclimate.org/Articles/2000/sea.
To carry your example to a more realistic level, do you put a colostomy bag on infants and toddlers or do you put diapers on them and when the inevitable accidents accumulate, you rent a carpet cleaner twice a year? The easy mitigation steps have generally been taken in the first world (3rd world industry not covered by Kyoto is a different matter). Kyoto is as unrealistic and dangerous as those colostomy bags.
Kyoto doesn't make proper provision for carbon sinks. That's just foolish.
Trees are just one example of a carbon sink. Kyoto doesn't recognize any of them. The US considered carbon sinks as part of a comprehensive strategy to control CO2 levels, the EU wanted to keep the blinders on and just look at emissions. So Kyoto breaks down. The broader US approach would allow more scope for inventive solutions like planting trees, cleaning CO2 out of the atmosphere to create pollution credits that could be sold (creating a clean air industry while they're at it), and leaving an open framework for the inventiveness of humanity to come up with new solutions the politicians hadn't even dreamed of.
The EU was not amused. Screw the EU.
Actually, thin air is exactly how you generate cold. You compress it let it cool toward room temperature, and then you let it expand (thin) to cool below room temperature. So in essence, you do generate cold out of thin air. Your meaning is valid, but that was an ironic choice of words.
It always will. The point is that you also move the extra heat away from whatever it is you are cooling.
Your processor might run at 70 degrees celsius without cooling, you put the coolchip against it, and the processor will be at, say, 40 degrees, while the hot side of the coolchip will be at, for example, 120 degrees.
Looks like the company has been reading Slashdot, and has posted replies to a lot of the questions raised here.