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.
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.
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
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.
If what they claim is true, why has their server melted?
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
I'm thinking we should be coating space shuttles with this stuff, under the first protective layer of course w/ a fluid cooling system to pull the heat away from the cool chip material on the surface straight to another set of cool chip stuff positioned near an exhaust manifold.
So many potential uses... personal cooling systems, body temp regulated of course (thinking of spinning the material into thread and having it woven into a jacket liner while static/kinetic energy or temp gradients powers it).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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.
No, this means that someone already has claimed it and Boeing the next in the line if the first claimant drops out of the deal.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
No, Egg Dye had it right. Boeing has the rights to buy the technology first for aerospace applications. If they pass, then Cool Chips can take it to whomever they wish. Nobody is in line ahead of Boeing.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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
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.
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.
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?
If it costs them 50c to produce a chip as efficient as a $200 aircon heat pump, then until there is someone else who can produce a heat pump for less than $200 there is no reason to charge less than $180 for the chip.
I suspect this is what has happened with the micromirror chips Texas Instruments invented to replace LCD projectors, for all the waffling on about how cheap these things would be, they've been available for a few years now and a projector will still set you back $5000, regardless of whether you get LCD or micromirror.
Until there is a competeing technology, these chips will not be significantly cheaper.
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.
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.
Though price is nice, it is not will initially sell this device ...
If it has a smaller foot print and is more efficent than other direct cooling technologies, it will sell.
Trust me, If I could use this to cool a CCD chip down to LN temperatures without the use of a water chiller or LN dewar I would be willing to pay for it.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MAJOR CORRECTION!
The polar ice caps melting means the sea level rises and we lose land, and not gain any. That is a very big deal.
Now personally, I am a sceptical enviromentalist and it's perfectly possible this is all entirely normal behaviour for our ecosystem, but what we are doing is absolutely just making things worse.
Now I agree that AC is not a waste, it's damn hot in some places and people would die (litteraly) if it wasn't there.
Also, yes the Kyoto agreement didn't make a lot of sense in the US, because it didn't take in to account how many forests the US plants (or other forms of conservation). In this respect, the Kyoto agreement was fundementally flawed.
BUT, all that said, the US (in general) seems to have less of an 'public awareness' of this issue. And it's something that all countries need to tackle.
Even if the melting of the polar caps is entirely natrual, it's surely fair to except we are all only making things worse, and pretending that the issue doesn't exist is not going to make it go away.
"The main problem i see is in the transit of the electrons/energy across several atoms etc..."
Already been done - that's how a transistor works. With a transistor though, the gap is on a much smaller scale (cross section), so any cooling effects will be far outweighed by other inefficiencies in the system.
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.
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
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!
They may have cool chips, but when Slashdot makes their site SlashHot they apparently can't handle it.
Miko O'Sullivan
Now I agree that AC is not a waste, it's damn hot in some places and people would die (litteraly) if it wasn't there.
The goldminers of Western Australia didn't have AC for 150 years. I've been to a place where it can get up to a mind boggling 50 degrees Celcius.
Underground houses/rooms keep the temperatures in living spaces bearable.
India isn't blessed with AC all over the place and yet the hot streets aren't littered with burnt corpses. (just regular corpses and the living dead)
I've not been to the inerior of the US but I guess the temperatures are pretty much the same. AC makes the environment less challenging but isn't life or death.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
Also, yes the Kyoto agreement didn't make a lot of sense in the US, because it didn't take in to account how many forests the US plants (or other forms of conservation). In this respect, the Kyoto agreement was fundementally flawed.
So if we followed your logic Canada does not have to concern itself with pollution?
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
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.
The theory is: If the ice caps recede, so will glaciers, releasing land for use. I've seen the figure that if all the ice caps and glacial areas melted, the ocean levels would rise only a few inches, not enough to be overly problematic. It is true that most ice is floating, and so wouldn't cause the sea levels to rise any (don't believe me? Fill up a glass of ice water so that the ice cube is sticking out the top and the water is at the brim... and let it melt. The water level will remain constant (minus evaporation). Another theory is that we're coming off of an ice age and so the warming is natural. Given the quality of information I think that probably saying the Truth of being at the end of an ice age or overdue for another one is probably more hype than science. My theory is: Polluting isn't a good idea, but on the other hand, there's no reason to go shoot myself immediately because Waterworld won't happen next year.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
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."
Load of crock. Even during a heat wave in Dallas during my high school years where most of the people still had air conditioning, we had elderly people (who didn't have air conditioning) dropping dead like flies, and many that dropped and nearly died. And this is in temperatures well below your vaunted 50 degrees C. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke can indeed be life or death.
Heat exhaustion is a fairly common problem seen in the southern US, and I imagine in other hot climes in the world. I'd like to see how long you survive in a place with 50 C temps, no ac, and no wind. Arizona and Nevada in the summer are hot enough to give you first degree burns on the bottoms of your feet through athletic shoes if you stand on the pavement long enough. (Been there, done that.)
Just because you haven't personally seen any smoking corpses in India doesn't mean that people don't die of heat stroke and dehydration there regularly. And I'm thinking that the life expectancy of the western australian gold miners wasn't all the great either. Underground rooms aren't an option in many warm climes due to swamps/coastline. Where I live, and underground room pretty much turns into an underwater room.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
What a bizzare statement to make!
I said the Kyoto agreement was fundementally flawed.
That's all. It's pretty clear statement.
It doesnt give credit for the amount of conservation a company does (so even it does more good than harm, you can fail to meet the requirements, and even if you harm the environment without reparing any past damage you can pass it with flying colors).
Clearly, as it stands, there is no actually incentive or credit given for being a good environmental citizen. Broadly speaking it's a good idea, but the Kyoto agreement was rotten way of doing it (and was lampooned as such by various sources, including a particularly good reponse inThe Economist).
How the fuck you infered that as 'if we followed your logic Canada does not have to concern itself with pollution?' is beyond me.
Will Rogers said something like this - It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble, it's what we know that just isn't so.
As far as I know, sea levels are rising in some areas and falling in others. Also, the global warmin zealots have been caught bending the facts to fit their theories. The problem was so bad at the IPCC that one of the scientists working on the main report (which no policy maker reads) actually wrote on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that the policymakers summary (which lawmakers, journalists, and interested laymen do read) simply made stuff up about the main report.
How much of what you know, just isn't so?
BTW: few on the pro-global warming side made any courageous stands for the truth and the document was not pulled. Until the global-warming advocates give a damn about truth and true science rather than hype and fundraising letters, why should we believe a word of what they say?
Nobody should, based only on a PR news release. Issues of location and corporate structure aside, these news releases crop up on the PR newswire and Yahoo stock message boards constantly throughout the day, from all sorts of small/startup businesses, and appear to be generated at a frequency inversely proportional to the company's net worth. Releases mentioning "alliances" between the small company and a much larger one are common. Because of this, I kinda question whether this article should have even been Slashdotted... it's really just an ad, rather than news.
As for the product itself, it sounds a lot like a classic boondoggle, but I have no way of saying if it is or not. Seems like it would be a challenge to effectively transfer that much cooling capacity to a large volume of air/fluid from such a small surface area.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
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).
The Canadians didn't have Great Plains Indians burning huge tracts of forests on a regular basis to extend the range of the buffalo over a good quarter of the country (well, maybe a bit in the south of Canada). To the extent that the US increases actual forest land over what was there, I think it's quite fair to get carbon sink credits.
If some bright fellow invented a general CO2 collector that could be planted on floating platforms in the middle of the oceans and suck up more than all the manmade CO2 that was being pumped out, the Kyoto treaty would *still* require a CO2 emission restriction regimin even though it would be totally useless.
Yeah, I'd say that's fundamentally and fatally flawed.
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...
Your right to say there are a lot of zelots who bend the facts, I agree.
- Sceptic al-Environmentalis-0521804477.html
There is a book called the Sceptial Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg which I think you might like:
http://www.easyfiction.co.uk/Bjorn-Lomborg
It points out "exaggeration and selective quotation" that is often, though some have said the book itself is guilty of just that - YMMV.
Though personally I think it's understable, given the complete reistance of people to accept some basic facts.
I would say though that Sea Levels are NOT falling in some areas and rising in others, that is completly untrue. That would not actually be possible (unless you were talking about sea levels in inland sea's, which is attributable to rainfall alone and has nothing to do with polar ice caps).
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
Yes, they did to that, but they did not ask any other company to be a part of the hoax and their website was only one layer deep. If you clicked on any one of the links on the fake site it took you to a real SEC info page about how you could have just been scammed.
/is/ a scam.
It looks like, from posts prior to this one, that the company really
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Hey, no need to use such foul language! Belgium is the most unspeakably rude word in the Galaxy.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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..
If the ice caps recede, so will glaciers, releasing land for use.
Most glaciers are in mountaine area. Not much use from that aea if the glacier is gone. At least not in relation to the same amount of are in a more asy to farm zone.
It is true that most ice is floating
No this is wrong. Would be interesting from where you got that.
The north polar reagion is only floating ice. So your sample with the ice qube in a glass of water is right, besides the fact that we have in this case "sweet water ice" floating in "salt water". If it melts, the levle rises. (
The south polar reagion is a continent. That continent is a bit bigger than Australia or about 1.5 times the size of the United States. (www.everything2.com)
That continent is covered with a ice cap about 2km to 4 km hight.
Oh, nice, everything2.com even covers that also, and they say the highest ice mountaine is 5km
Anyway, if all that ice would melt the sea level would rise about 100 meters. Of course the global warming is not that fast. So a sea level raise over the next 50 years will only be about 10 meters, bye bye New York
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
P.S. if you go for skiing to Austria or Swizerland you can watch the snow line going up the mountaine each year. A winter 0.1 degree warmer than the year before is 2 weeks less winter holidays or 100 meters higher snow line.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"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.
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."
It really is such a sickening debate. On the one hand, you have the Rush Limbaughs of the world who completely deny the possibility that we've done any damage to the environment. Then on the other side, we have the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Hollywood that keeps telling us that we're all going to die any second from our horrifying environmental practices.
Both sides are all too willing to pick their sources of "information" selectively. That's not Science, that's Religion.
Lomborg has his issues with adherence to good Science, but I think his willingness to re-examine the issue from another direction is refreshing. Overall, we'd be better off if more of the combatants took this approach.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
As far as I know, sea levels are rising in some areas and falling in others.
Erm
How, should that be possible? Take a soup plate fill it wit water, then let it raise at one side and fall at the other, show me how you do that.
Also, the global warmin zealots have been caught bending the facts to fit their theories.
There is no such thing like "the global warmin zealots". If one of them or two of them or a group of them bended facts
Bending of facts seem only to happen in wide scale by anti global warming "zealots" as you call them. Just like the negation of ozone layer holes by the industries producing ozone killer gases.
BTW: El Ninjo is not familar to you, is it?
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...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.
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.
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'...
The polar ice caps melting means the sea level rises and we lose land, and not gain any.
Actually it depends if the ice is covering land or sea. If the ice is on land then it's melting can raise sea level, if the ice is already floating then it dosn't make much difference.
it didn't take in to account how many forests the US plants
Planting forests? A bunch of trees is not a forest
-no broken link
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.
when there's icicles hanging from your heat sink and your CPU monitor reports 1800 degrees celsius.
Seriously, the sea isn't all at sea level. Thanks to winds and currents, the level of the water differs. If wind and current patterns were to change, some places would show drops and others would show rises.
That said, the studies I've seen about sea level changes account for this, so I think that the ocean is indeed rising. And since one of the things that global warming would cause is a shift in wind and current patterns, that seems even more evidence.
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.
My point is if we allow countries to receive credit for their natural resources, what stops a country like Canada from polluting. They will have all the credits that they need to polute two to three times more per capita.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
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)
tripping over poor people? Nah I ususally kick them out of the way. - not so anonymous
I ate my sig.
Could you please provide a link with proof of this statement? I've never seen anything that proves a rotting tree releases as much CO2 as the tree ever took in during its entire lifetime.
This is basic biology.
Probably a standard primary school biology course is enough?
Every plant grows by taking CO2 from the atmosphere and producing cellulose from it.
The O2 is more or less returned to the atmosphere(at night the plant burns O2 with sugar to CO2, btw.) the carbon is build into the plant.
If the plant is rotting microbes are EATING the plant, burning the carbon in the plant with atmospheric O2 back to CO2.
Exception: the plant is covered with some miles of earth and converted to coal.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
yeah ... but the originbal poster was talking about level differences like they will happen if the ant arctic ice is melting.
...
Of course you have tidal and wind and other forces leading to sea level changes.
E.g. Africa raises each year 1 inch
BUT: of course if a global change in the amount of liquid water happends, no place will be unaffected.
And no place will be save from it, by saying: here it won't raise that high.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I believe that what I posted is known as black humor. I've actually had many an interesting conversation with homeless people, some of whom, if you would believe it, actually enjoy the lifestyle. As to your hypothetical. If one became chronically ill in the US, they would get disability. Their home (if they were at least semi intelligent) would be homesteaded (and thus protected). In america, you wouldn't lose your house, nor would you be freezing under a bridge. Now what were we talking about?
I ate my sig.
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.
- Rob
Your post is a case in point.
I've heard plenty of pundits on the environmentalists' side that have espoused imminent death, from a circa 1970 documentary I remember watching in school that predicted that by the 1990's acid rain might reach deadly proportions -- to the early 1990's, when Ted Danson predicted that within ten years, our environment would collapse. How about when Jimmy Carter told the nation that we had 50 years of petroleum left in the world? Uhoh... we'd better start hording now!
And if by some chance you're claiming that the "other" side is the one that I've grossly exaggerated, just spend a few days listening to Rush Limbaugh, you'll hear him say directly that man has had little if no impact upon the environment.
Get your head out of your ass and realize that your side is almost equally culpable in the attempted slaying of the truth.
People like me who are in the middle have no respect for you extremists, and we won't support you until you start pushing facts, not dogma.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
A few inches is wrong. See the replies above. But also...
Among other things, disappearing ice in polar regions will mean changed reflective index of earth surface in polar regions, which means more heat absorption from sun, which means a rise in global temperatures. BTW, any lands "released for use" in arctic regions will be countered thousandfold by lands in the tropical region becoming deserts because of rising global temperature and changing precipitation patterns.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Oh. So it's third-world peasants that consume increasing amount of energy, that for some reason mysteriously registers as being consumed in US. Damn energy smugglers!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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
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.
One of the unresolved questions is whether the effect of increased evaporation due to global warming outweighs the rise due to the reduced glacier areas.
h tm
http://www.co2andclimate.org/Articles/2000/sea.
The real answer is that noboy knows for sure how all of this is going to play out which is why the apocalyptics are so desperate to close debate and get some kind of phony consensus accepted via browbeating any real scientific dissent.
Science shouldn't work that way and any true scientist should be worried about efforts to shut down discussion and twist data.
Another possibility is to divide the plate (The Americas provide a real world example). As another person in this thread mentioned, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Panama differ by 8 inches.
h tm
I would suggest you look up the Simpson effect which says that greenhouse effect increases in temperatures can cause increased snowfall in polar regions. So would the increased polar snow mitigate, entirely cancel, or exceed the snow melt caused by the increased temps? Nobody seems to have run the numbers properly yet.
Here's a decent article.
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.
The problem is that the system is naturally shifting in a direction we don't know. We can't even measure the damn thing right (see the differential between satellite and ground station temp readings, one shows no warming the other does), and you propose that somebody building a factory is supposed to prove that they don't have a bad impact on the environment? This is a bad joke.
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.
But the global warming movement is predicated on the position that we *do* understand the system. If the inputs that humans make are not going to affect world climate, why would we ever lower production when we have people dying for the lack of production?
From your comments on equal distribution it's clear that you haven't studied the real, practical, and very destructive effects of government monkeying around with distribution systems. Traditional food exporters tend to become food importers when markets are destroyed and replaced by 'equal distribution' via government. The effects are pretty much the same across all sectors. Private control of the means of production and distribution systems via contract, not ration coupon, lead to abundance. The problem is where governments steal so much that the people have no money and that is something that doesn't get solved by abolishing the free market.
This isn't to say that no environmental regulations are warranted. Until we, as a society, figure out how to make a functioning market in pollution rights, regulation is the best route for now but CO2 as a pollutant? Come off it. If we were to deploy machines to remove 100% of the CO2 from the atmosphere, we would have huge plant kills downwind of the facilities.
The easy pollution gains have largely been made. In the 1st world, we're spending more and more to get incrementally less gain. That's not a very good use of resources.
As for the business cycle, the free market maybe gets production levels right 60% of the time. But government led alternative systems get it right maybe 20% of the time. So should we sacrifice the not so good for the truly pathetic? Why would we ever do that?
You are woefully uneducated about economics. Price signals are the only system yet discovered to ensure that we have a working economy that is sustainable. You are echoing a million failed reformers but at least they had the excuse that their ideas had not been tried. the bloody results of trying to seriously run economies without meaningful price signals (economics via caring or planning, or rationing) are well documented and at this point in human knowledge what you are proposing goes beyond niave, it is monstrously evil.
Social Security and the rest of the welfare apparatus is an intergenerational tax on our future. You may find palming off the cost of our benefits on to our children to be acceptable but I don't. The costs rise and rise while benefits are stagnant or shrink. There is a breaking point and we are fast reaching it in SS, healthcare, and a host of other leftist bribes to the electorate of a few generations ago. We'll either give these opiates up or lose our freedom. To some extent we already have.
In countries that were not blessed with a long period of economic freedom, socialist utopias fail quicker. There may be a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually the nation does fall, no matter how rich it was in the past.
Back to climate, chaotic systems (of which the climate is one) are not perfectly predictable because they are heavily initial condition dependent. They can, however, be relatively stable which climate obviously is. The problem of global warming isn't whether we effect climate, an individual exhalation does that, it is rather whether our effects are enough to knock us out of our current main pattern into a new one and whether or not that new pattern would be better than the current one. It is *those* questions that are not well resolved.
Things float when they displace an amount of water equal in weight to their total weight. Thus if you wanted to cause an object weighting 1 pound to float, it will need to displace exactly one pound of water. Thus it needs to have a volume equal to or greater than the volume of one pound of water in order to float. Any extra volume greater than the volume of one pound of water will stick up above the surface of the wanter that the object if floating in.
Now take a pound of ice. Since ice is less dense than water a pound of ice will have a volume greater than a pound of liquid water. Thus it will float in liquid water. When a pound of ice is floating, it will displace exactly the volume of one pound of water, and the extra volume of ice will stick up above the water.
What hapens when this floating ice melts? Well, obviously it turns into a pound of water, and less obviously, in the process it decreases its volume because as previously stated, the density of liquid water is greater than the density of ice. The pound of water-that-was-ice will exactly fill the hole displace by the ice floating in water, since that hole was exactly the volume of one pound of water.
Thus, floating ice melting does not change the level of the water as it melts.
There are subtle differences when we start mixing fresh-water-icebergs in a salt-water-ocean, but they do not have a great effect, I think.
Scientific America did a fairly lenghtly piece on this in their January 2002 issue which pointed out a large number of fundamental flaws in the book. They had a breif rebuttal the next issue and further disussion in the letters to the editor. Pretty interesting, but Bjorn doesn't seem very persuasive in that forum at least.