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Sandia's Smart Heat Pipe
An anonymous reader writes "Science Blog is reporting a story from Sandia National Laboratory, best known for its nuclear weapons research. "Evacuating heat is one of the great problems facing engineers as they design faster laptops by downsizing circuit sizes and stacking chips one above the other. The heat from more circuits and chips increase the likelihood of circuit failures as well as overly heated laps. "Space, military, and consumer applications, are all bumping up against a thermal barrier," says Sandia researcher Mike Rightley, whose newly patented "smart" heat pipe seems to solve the problem. The simple, self-powered mechanism transfers heat to the side edge of the computer, where air fins or a tiny fan can dissipate the unwanted energy into air."
Seems to me that its just a more advanced refridgerator. Rather than moving freon to the back, it moves methanol to the sides. No news here people.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
No matter what i do my laptop is one hot sucker! Especially when i have it docked, whoever made my docking station (all from Dell) they decided to block my fans on the back of the laptop when I dock it.
Sometimes the better thing is simply a more well though out design, all this newer technology is good too of course but people need to stop substituting higher technology for stupidity.
... for this guy.
Q.
In colder climates, the heat could be dumped into hand warmers rather than undesirably into fabric and the flesh beneath.
colder clients being the 66F computer room? i know 66F isn't that cold, but when you're drinking a code red, my hands get quite numb in there. be nice to be able to flip a switch and redirect that heat up into the keyboard instead of the edge...
Altho its nice to have better cooling for computers, this news is just redundant.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
When they have found a way to channel the heat into keeping my cup of coffee warm while I'm reading then i'll be intrested.
I see nothing in this article that distinguishes this "smart" heat pipe from standard heat pipes that have existed for quite some time.
Yes, this technology is significantly better than air being blown over a heatsink on a CPU.
No, it's nothing new. Shuttle small-form-factor PCs anyone? And Dell Inspiron 8x00 series laptops too. Probably other laptop manufacturers are also already using heat pipes.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Cool! (heh, heh)
Actually my main thought is that this makes living comfortably off the grid even more viable.
All that compressor-based stuff? Fridges with motors and coils and water traps? Naw, they's just for thems as don't know any better.
I *love* living in the future!
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
news flash, more advanced refrigerator.
Happy now???
Damn Joint Strike Fighter, its just a more advanced
Wright Flyer, no news here.
Damn AIDs vaccine, they are just repeating Dr Jenner's smallpox vaccine.
Damn airconditioning, its just a reverse campfire.
Damn,... well you get the idea.
I distinctly remember a law suit which involved a customer suing McDonalds because they hadn't warned her that the coffee was HOT. I guess laptops have to come with that warning too. Meanwhile, The register (register.co.uk) had an article about a buy burning his weenie thanks to a laptop.o rums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=24bcc587f9de10276 57e1d7862a85f58&threadid=56924
The bonus - here is a link for a genius who wanted to water cool his cpu http://www.avforums.com/frame.html?http://www.avf
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
we may not be interested in this type of news, but I this as a great stepping stone for advanced and more powerful machinery. I always heard about computers, for instance not going past certain speed in Mhz because of various factors, one of them being the amount of heat it generates. So hats off to all the people that work hard to make life better for others.
How can electronics overheat in space?
cooling engineers. We need to continue working towards things like 0.01 micron process (and smaller), fiber optic interconnects, and use the technologies like from Alchemy, Inc. like I'm sure AMD is doing.
What I'm really hoping for one day is a chip made entirely of fiber optics. Sure it's a ways off, but certainly should help speed and heat issues.
I remember sitting in on a presentation of heat pipe theory and applications.
The article talks about how the methanol vaporizes at one end, and condenses at the other. Then the liquid wicks back to the first end, where it can be vaporized again. You don't necessarily have to use methanol; the coolant is varied according to the temperature range you operate in.
The pipe pressure is carefully set so that the vaporization takes place at the optimal temperature. Usually these pipes are used in a vertical configuration, so that the vapor rises and gets to the other end more quickly, and the condensate sinks to other end quickly. The heat pipe behavior is then kind of like a passive heat diode.
A use for heat pipes was presented; apparently a lot of structures were sinking on the Alaska pipeline. When the ground was frozen, everything was fine...but the permafrost was receding in the warm months. The solution was to keep the ground frozen all the time, by removing heat from about 20 feet down. Heat pipes were constructed with a vaporization point at the desired temperature, and sunk into the ground at the problem areas. The ground stayed frozen, and the problem was solved.
...
My Spectrum 128 K used to have fins too
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
Exacerbating the heat-death of the universe. Whee!
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
For those having trouble with the reference:
phimosis: unretractable foreskin
balanitis: inflammation of the helmet
I wonder what else designers could do with that extra heat energy. If these heat pipes turn methanol into vapor, carry it to heat fans, then recondense it (due to heat loss) back into liquid.... isn't this process quite similar to how turbines work with steam? I wonder how much power could be gleaned from the extra heat. Maybe someone could design a tiny electrical generator. I doubt you could run anything significant off the power output, but I'm sure there could be some use for it, rather than simply letting that extra energy go to waste.
When using a laptop, especially when running on batteries, no energy is unwanted. If these scientists could design a system where they took the "unwanted" heat energy and somehow transfered it back into the battery, then it wouldn't be unwanted, no? Of course, there would be some lose, but it's still better than getting nothing but a burned lap from the heat generated by your laptop.
Why the hell do we insist on using Intel heat pumps in our laptops anyway?! There are any of a dozen different non-Intel chips that are nearly as fast as a decent P-III (or, at least, from the user's perspective) that don't need heatsinks at all! MIPS, ARM (ok, even StrongARM and XScale), SH, ...
Oh, wait, Bill doesn't want to support Windows on those chips. My bad. He'd rather force the rest of the industry and users to deal with crappy, Intel-specific problems like heat and power consumption than construct a product that's actually well-designed and portable. Yea, that's "innovative".
b.g.
b.g.
I worked on a Compaq Laptop 6 years ago that had a heat pipe. It was solid copper, not a fluid system, but the principle the same. It's not exactly revolutionary...
Either that or you're a moron and there is something novel about the described technology.
Hmmmmm... I wonder.
"It's clear now that the smaller we go, the more that cooling engineers need to be involved early in product design."
How small could these pipes be? Could methonol filled nanotubes vent heat from processors? Or would liquid nitrogen still be the move?
I would think liquid nitrogen would be better for troops - I don't know about you, but were I a troop, predator or no predator, I would want the smallest infrared signature possible in combat. And processor temperatures ought to show up nicely while venting, - also, the troops could dip ballons and bannanas in the nitrogen and then shatter them to impress villagers.
Glad it's all done for a good cause. I just hope it's tax deductible
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
This will not stop Intel's crippled Mobile CPUs from polluting the market for years to cum.
Or your skin.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
This isn't a new idea. Technology has come full circle- the first computers were cooled with fluid pumps, and guess what? We were right the first time.
And the old problems with heat pumps will return- leaks that short out the machine, the added complexity of the design, yet another part to get disconnected, and idiots buring themselves by opening the box and touching the thing after it's been running for days.
Heat sinks are just that- sinks. They hold the heat, they don't disperse it. Almost any heat dispersal method is preferable to heat sinks, which is preferable to no thermal control whatsoever.
But they better make those tubes industrial-strength, especially on laptops. Computers are put through a lot rougher treatment than they're ever specced for; the hoses used for this had better be up to the task.
I can see a very real possibility of a computer springing a leak and shorting itself out, and/or dripping on the user and scalding him/her- and that user very well might have reason to sue.
It's a good idea. Just as it was the first time. But engineers need to take this type of thing into account in the original spec; it can't be slapped on at the end like just another Microsoft UI.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
This research is funded by the American tax payer. Why are they patenting it? Doesn't it belong in the public domain?
In a fridge you have coolant moving through pipes at high pressure, the pressure is dropped which then causes it to suck heat out of something( ie your food), the heat is then dissipated thorugh a heat exchanger and then a compressor recompresses the fluid. A refridgeration cycle does not work without a compressor or it would defy the laws of thermodynamics.
This is however closer to a more advanced heat fin technology, heat fins are used to wick heat away from a heat source, but eventually a point in the fin becomes too cold to tranfer heat and making the fin longer doesnt' do you any good, so what do you do now?
Use a heat pipe to move the heat form one place to another, namely another set of fins, or the same fins to get more use out of their length.
So what is the main difference between your fridge and a heat pipe, one sucks energy out of something , making it colder then room temperature, and another one transports heat to another source but can never make it cooler then room termperature.
Because HPT equipment treats the entire home with dry-cooled air, there is no need for additional dehumidifiers or special equipment. Not only is dry-cooling better for you, it costs less to operate, usually recovering a payback on installation within 2 to 4 years as you set the thermostat 2 to 3 F higher.
The heat pipe dehumidification process is automatically activated any time the air conditioner is operating. In the winter, the smart heat pipes automatically deactivate, allowing your central heating system to operate as normal.
I wonder if they can apply that acoustothermic cooling technology to CPUs that was posted a couple days ago.
Has anything been said about energy impact?... moving liquids around requires more work than moving gases I would guess.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
/.
This guy may have had the external vents in the wrong location.
On the other hand the extra heat vented to the outside edges could be a handy deterent to theft, just change from sleep mode to heat mode.
And I'm eager to Evaluate the new George Foreman laptop.
If I understand the article correctly, this is new in that is has a very small size, and uses a very small amount of liquid to conduct the heat, and requires no mechanical pump to drive it, no rewiring, etc.
Because of this, it can easily be fit into an existing design with minimal re-engineering of your product. That's where the cost comes into play for manufacturers -- or has no one noticed that we don't see liquid cooling in consumer computers yet? Too expensive to add into existing designs. Also, you get one leak, there goes your computer. Not to mention the potential hazards of having a liquid flowing over live electrical circuits.
Small size, small amount of coolant liquid, and no need to add mechanical pumps. Any laptop manufacturer could add this and not have to increase the price to cover the retooling costs for the manufacturing process. This means a faster -- and naturally hotter -- chip could be put into the laptop. That will mean laptops that are as fast as desktops, instead of lagging behind by a few years.
What's the name of the company that will be making these things? I want to buy stock NOW while I can still afford it!!!!
Whew! This water sure is cold!
One of the largest applications of "heat pipes" is in the Alyeska Pipeline. The oil they're moving is hotter than the permafrost supporting the pipe. If the permafrost melts... well, we can guess what happens.
So if you look at the picture on the site, the heat pipe is actually built into the support structure of the pipe joints. The little vanes on the posts wick away heat that is absorbed from the ground. They use a substance that has a very low vapor pressure in order to capitalize on the energy released in the latent heat of vaporization and condensation of the anhydrous ammonia (caused by the cold Alaska air circling around the vanes). You can find the details of this huge heat-pipe installation on their Web site.
Pretty cool (literally)!
TTFN
And some pretty fly blotter as well....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
There are any of a dozen different non-Intel chips that are nearly as fast as a decent P-III (or, at least, from the user's perspective)
The customer is always right. The customer just has to run a favorite proprietary x86-only app or game. In most cases, emulating a recent x86 application on a non-x86 CPU produces poor performance. That's part of why Mac laptops have such a small market share compared to x86 laptops.
Will I retire or break 10K?
the human asshole.
This research is funded by the American tax payer. Why are they patenting it?
Here's how I understand it: In general, the American citizens pay for the "seed" research, and when a company buys it up, the company pays the American citizens back. Thus, in the end, the company that gets the patents has actually funded the research. Yes, I understand it's more complicated than that (more risks are taken with citizens' money than with patent holder's money, etc).
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is great for cooling and everything. However, they're not addressing the real problem that causes the heat in the first place. Once they discover a new, power efficient way to make chips, THAT will be news.
The micro grooves layed in the pipe by photolithographic techniques so the medium can wick properly along designed paths is probably what is patented here.
This device (as is says at the end of the article) uses capillary action to move the cooling liquid from the hot side to the cool side. It doesn't say if this is more efficient than phase change. I expect that it would work better in non-stationary applications, where a phase change material would just get mixed up. They list military wearables as a potential application.
I read that as "Santa's Smart Heat Pipe". I thought it was going to be another one of those "hey kids, this is what Santa does at the North Pole!" stories.
I should drink my coffee.
I have a Shuttle SS51G w/ P4-2.533 +1G DDR and I'm very happy with it. Heatpipe keeps inside surprisingly cool and is exceptionally quiet. Some have replaced the fan and fan grill or modified the case itself to lower the noise even further.
Pretty soon they'll be reading [H]ardOCP and the Case & Cooling section of Ars Technica, experimenting with peltiers and putting their computers in refrigerators.
:D
Then the government will truly be l33t.
Actually the JSF is just another Wright flyer. It isn't going to break the limits set by the Su-27. 1000 monkeys in the press saying it's great doesn't make it worth a hill o' beans.
I read the article, and it doesn't say how this is different from existing heat pipes. My Dell Inspiron 8200 uses a heat pipe to move heat from the CPU to a radiator in the back. The Shuttle lunchbox machines use heat pipes to get heat to a large heatsink in the back. You've been able to buy heat pipes to speed cooking the thanksgiving turkey for years.
What's the difference between them and this? They talk about technology but to those of us who don't know the specifics of *traditional* heat pipe manufacture, it means nothing.
I thought this problem had already been adequately solved by that scientist who used his penis to sink heat away from his laptop. So maybe this new heatpipe won't get blisters?
. php
http://www.manningworldnews.com/archives/00000264
It's more like living in the past. Early refrigerators didn't use electrical compressors and such. Your Grandmother's refrigerator used a pilot flame to do its cooling. Sure, it wasn't able to cool and freeze quite as well modern refridgerators do but, it still kept food cold and made ice.
How cool is that, to use a flame for refrigeration? It's so cool that it is still used today in things like Recreational Vehicle refrigerators. See here.
Existing heat pipes already use capillary action. I remember a while ago looking at info on heat pipes out of curiosity, and I saw a number of descriptions of various wicks that were in use, and this doesn't appear to be anything new, except thay maybe they've made slightly more efficient wicks.
Even these new heat pipes almost surely use a phase change - It's most likely possible to do it without a phase change, but far less effective/efficient. Current heat pipes use a phase change combined with capillary action - Gas vaporizes on heat source, condenses at radiator, and is wicked back. Heat pipes can be made without wicks, but they are orientation-sensitive - i.e. the condenser must be above the evaporator so gravity will bring the condensed medium back to the heat source. The Shuttle may not use a wick since the condenser is higher than the CPU, but in Dell laptops they are even, I'm positive that laptop heatpipes already use wicks.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Wait, what I'm getting from this is the methanol liquid absorbs the heat, turns into vapor, and leaves the encasement. Does the methanol vapor go with it? It says that it turns back into liquid.. how the hell? If methanol vapor does come out of the side that could be dangerous to people looking to plug in their headphones on the side of the pc and get a face full of deadly methanol vapor...
I work on a laptop most of the time, on battery power a lot. Every time my fan kicks in when I'm on battery, I think to myself how absurd this is... I am using up a significant percentage of my stored electrons to generate heat I don't want... I then use up a significant percentage of my stored electrons running fans to make thast heat go away.
Seems to me that even a small improvement in thermal efficiency of the processor would reduce TWO reasons to consume my precious battery power. Anything short of this seems like a hack - a stopgap solution until we get better thermal efficiency at the source of the problem.
Read the whole article, it is different. The difference is that:
1) They're using methanol, which at least some of the current commercial heatpipes don't.
2) They're using some sort of lithography to carve micron-scale curved pathways into the inside of the tubing. These are customized in order to wick the methanol to the correct locations. This allows them to really "shape" the methanol flow for much better efficiency (send 30% methanol to hot spot A and 70% to hot spot B, and release the heat at sink spot C), instead of just having the vapors/liquids roam around as they choose. This is a boon for any heatpipe, but especially if you have an embedded device that might need complex heatpipe routing to/from possibly multiple heat sources and heat sinks.
11*43+456^2
Other posters have stated the obvious: heat pipes are nothing new, they have been around in industrial capacities at least since the 60's. The papers I've read indicate that the original development was done for satellites, to move heat from electronics modules to the skin where fins were used to radiate the heat into space. Heat pipes are quite robust, in general.
The article gave no detail about why these new devices are 'smart', so I suspect it's used as a buzz word to grab attention. While the heat pipes aren't particular smart, applying them to CPU cooling is a good idea. I wish I had thought of it.
However, even more interesting is the size. If I were to design a cooling system using these, I'd use a flexible ribbon to move the heat up to the back plane of the screen. This has the ideal characteristic of having a large radiating area that's rarely covered up. Back of the envelope calculations show that you can cool a typical CPU by 40 degrees (130F to 90F) with only 4.5F increase in the back plane temperature. This idea is even more attractive for metal cased laptops.
However, I suspect that their use will be more general, extending to desktops: imagine completely passive CPU cooling - no fan, no pump, just a heat pipe the case.
I'll be interested to see if this idea makes it into general use, or whether our pc manufacturers are too hide bound to change.
Any, any, reduction is actual generated heat reduces the amount of additional energy needed to move that produced waste heat. The benefits are two-fold. Higher initial electrical efficiency, coupled with lower power requirements for running mechanical fans. However, some heat pipe designs (depending on their thermal characteristics) move heat well enough to be able to remove the mechanical fan as well. So, I don't think it's a stop-gap, per se. Just a good solution to the wrong problem.
But every time I make a suggestion that we work smarter, instead of brute forcing everything, I get modded down. I guess that means I should just post more crap, instead of better... you be the judge.
Damn American government, it's just another in a long line of takeovers by the rich elite.
Not only have large heat pipes been around for quite some time - their application on CPUs and various other computing/chips isn't novel either. The only novelty here is the size.
/ hhc-001.html
http://www.coolermaster.com.hk/en/products/cooler
http://us.shuttle.com/specs_access.asp?pro_id=150
I remember something else happening on September 11th 2001, But I can't recall what it was....
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
liquid -- in this case, methanol -- to vapor
If we can't trust society with a cup of hot McDonalds coffee how can we trust people with phase change methanol?
I can see the warnings stickered to future laptops: Do not use this laptop near an open flame. Smoking near this laptop is strictly prohibited!
-ted
Sorry, but if my laptop is truly to be used in my LAP, then venting the heat out the sides still is a problem. I want it vented out the top of the monitor or something.
I have an old 300Mhz P3 laptop that had a terrible vent design that shoots out and hits your right inner thigh. It becomes unusable after about 30-45 minutes unless you have a pillow or jacket (which itself becomes pretty warm). Another 600Mhz P3 laptop from the same manufacturer got smart and vented it out the back of the laptop, slightly upward. I can use it for hours.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Hmmm
And then someone suggests that we use the generator to power the laptop so we don't need the battery anyway...
I mean there is just enough energy here to make sure the fluid in the heat pipe flows. When you have all the mechanical losses involved in the minature turbine and alternator, not to mention the heat generated by the turbine/alternator combination.
Then you have the problem of the fact that the output of the alternator will need rectifying and regulating as the speed varies according to heat load.
The you have issue to do with the noise generated by these mechanical devices.
And you have to do all this with tiny mechanical devices that will fit in a laptop.
It seems odd to come up with a system that can transport heat to a remote passive radiator in small form devices so, in an ideal world, you don't need a mechanical fan. And then use a tiny mechanical generating plant.
Don't get me wrong, an interesting thought experiment, but given the losses in power generation its not practical.
--I'm not an engineer so can't answer this question. I was wondering why exactly no one has adapted thermocouples to this heat problem? Seems like a dandy idea to get some electricity back into the batteries. I've seen running an old kerosene lamp from russia that used a surrounding thermocouple that was adequate to run a normal radio. It looked like a normal kero lamp with fins around it, sort of like an air cooled cylinder on a small engine, kinda sorta. My boss at a dairy I worked at brought it back from a trip he made in the merchant marine to russia during ww2, it worked great! Just took waste heat, made electric, poof, done. Why can't something like this be done with hot chips? Seems like a decent way to help extend battery life and remove heat, the old two birds with one stone concept.
My laptop is about 6 months old, and it already had side heat dumping with a fan, and not a hot lap.
Before 'innovating' try researching what other companies already do.
It is also different in that they are using a phase-change heat transfer. When most heat pipes boil the water they are completely ineffective.
Also, traditional heat pipes rely on elevation differences to maintain flow.
The method replaces the typical laptop heat sink -- a chunk of metal that absorbs heat from circuits and then gives it up to air blown by a cooling fan -- with tiny liquid-filled pipes that shuttles heat to pre-chosen locations for dispersal. In the heatpipe loop, heat from the chip changes liquid -- in this case, methanol -- to vapor. The vapor yields up its heat at a pre-selected site, changes back to liquid and wicks back to its starting point to collect more heat.
I wonder if this would have any use outside of computing. Methanol sounds like it has properties that would be very useful in automotive cooling. This is a very big problem facing mechanical engineers. Is there anyone who has a better understanding of methanol or this system that could discuss its other applications?
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
idiot. my technics amp had just this kind of heat pipe thermal transfer technology back in the 80's. conclusion: the original poster is correct, this is neither news nor new to anyone not in their teens.
You're missing the point -- the JSF doesn't break the limits set by the F-22 either, nor is it intended to. It is intended to provide a cheap versatile platform suitable for common usage by a variety of services in a variety of nations, and with enough capability and punch to top anything it's actually likely to meet in combat. For hardcore air-superiority missions (if there are any), things like the F22, the new boeing daylight stealth designs, and other things now on the drawing board will serve quite well, thank you.
For a good piece on the design goals and selection process of the JSF, check out this piece from the Atlantic.
As for the Su-27, what of it? It's a nice trick plane, but aerobatics and raw platform capabilities have much less to do with modern air combat than targeting technologies and smart munitions -- check out, e.g. recent joint training sessions, in which Israeli pilots armed with 180 degree targeting capabilities and in-helmet HUDs won 220 out of 240 mock engagements against USMC pilots in identical aircraft, but without such toys. (and yes, unlike USMC, the USAF and to some extent the Navy have such toys and more...)
If he hurries, he can have methanol spill into his unhealed lap. It's a disinfectant you know. Call it Norton Laptop. No smoking, please, wicked methonol is highly flamible.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If it was a heat pipe, it was probably not solid copper, though it looked like it. It would be a copper tube filled with a volatile liquid. Liquid evaporates at the hot end, diffuses to cool end where it condenses, transferring heat as it does so. But most of them looked solid.
This invention just looks (from the uninformative article) as if they hae some improvements on the mechanical structire and on helping the methanol get thr right idea about where to flow (cappillaries with "one way" structires, I would guess).
As said elsewhere, only incremental. But then, the latest Pentium is "only incremental" on the original 386 - but thos increments have taken us a long way.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
FYI, Jenner bought his diploma for something like $20
omg, I actually have an old dell latitude like the one the article said he was using.
:-P
Either I had the common sense to remove my laptop before it burned me.... or I'm just not as brave as to admit it
You're right, I confused the JSF with the F-22. But, most air forces using the Su-27 are buying them with non-Russian targeting systems and missiles, in some cases, they're getting those from Israel. So as you mentioned, the Su-27 will have these superior systems, and as you also mention it has great maneuverability, and I don't remember this correctly, but it has thrust in the same region as the F-22. The Russians do stealth research too, it's a matter of degree whose is better. The F-22 has some kind of link-up capability with other aircraft on the same mission, which is a matter of software.
As I mentioned in another post, phase-change heat transfer in heat pipes is old hat. So is using a wick to allow for the heat pipe to work without an elevation difference. For an example of the latter, see the aforementioned Dell Inspiron 8200. Has no problem working with the laptop level, or even with the laptop tilted backwards (i.e. evaporator above condenser)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Reminds me of the Hoover Dam, where they had a heat problem when the concrete dried. The solution was to run small pipes through the wet concrete and let the natural cool water flow through the pipes. This cooled the concrete as it set. Later, the pipes themselves could be filled in with concrete themselves.
However, I suspect that their use will be more general, extending to desktops: imagine completely passive CPU cooling - no fan, no pump, just a heat pipe the case. I'll be interested to see if this idea makes it into general use, or whether our pc manufacturers are too hide bound to change.
I received my Signum Data FutureClient earlier this week. It's a desktop PC with no fans at all, yet still havin a 1.8 GHz P4 processor (up to 2.2 GHz available). The custom case, which takes standard Micro-ATX mobos, has big cooling fins on the sides and there is a heatpipe to keep the CPU cool.
While torturing the machine with cpuburn I measured temps of up to 55 deg C on the outside of the case near the point into which the heatpipe from the CPU is fixed. I asked about the max. ambient temperature, and Signum Data told me it should be safe to run the computer at up to 32 deg C.
The downside of this machine is that it only takes 2.5" hard drives inside the case. For bigger HD's they recommend using external FireWire units. Currently I'm running a Seagate Barracuda ATA V with the ribbon cable coming out in the back of the case from a PCI slot opening... not the most reliable solution there is, and a bit of a shame to run such a hack on a machine this cool.. ;-)
These have been around for years. Sounds like its just the current improvement.
Yawn...
we're freezing our asses off... we could use all that heat you're trying to get rid of
Shunting heat around in a laptop is interesting, but it's only a detour that doesn't solve the real problem...
The problem is that we need some advance that will increase computational speed AND run cooler. Much cooler. Nanotech's still a ways off. What's going to be the tech between present day and then?
It doesn't matter where you put fans in a laptop. It doesn't matter how you try to get rid of the heat. You still have lots of folks (like my wife, for one) that want to place their laptop on a down comforter, or some other surface that does NOTHING to disperse heat.
p.s. I've been listening to damn computer fans since 1981 (Vax 11/750). Sick of 'em (but yet my study has 3 machines running... go figure)
This is why it's newsworthy... Sandia figured out a better way to get the working fluid in the heatpipe to wick:
The wick in the Sandia heat pipe is made of finely etched lines about as deep as fingerprints. These guide methanol between several locations and an arbitrary end point. The structure, which works by capillary action like a kerosene wick, consists of a ring of copper used to separate two plates of copper. Sixty-micron-tall curving, porous copper lines (slightly less thick than the diameter of a human hair) made with photolithographic techniques, allow material wicking directionally along the surface to defy gravity.
This parent post is right. We are using these exact heat pipes in our Tablet PCs. This has been done even before our projects. And yes, we use the SAME SAME SAME! technology and specs. I even had our thermals engineer review the article, and he says, "yeah, that's exactally what we've got."
I got all excited at first, thinking that there was a better heat pipe that could improve our thermal performance, but this is EXACTALLY what we are using right now. What a disapointment. Interestingly, we are supplying the Army and Air Force.
I guess the Taiwanese are ahead of the US Government labs on this one.
Vacuums are incredible insulators. So, in space, you would be insulating the computer chips, aka keeping the chips WARM. You would want to remove the heat somehow, right?
The main selling point of the F-22 is supercruise. Also there is something of a synergy between stealth and supercruise.
Bumping the processor speed yet again isn't going to do squat when my win2k laptop swaps.
Give me a laptop HD as fast as a low end desktop drive and then we can talk about better cooling....
Remember the guy who had his dick burnt by using his laptop on his lap?
;)
Thing which bothered me about that was that he felt nothing whilst using the laptop; the pain & blisters appeared some time after using the laptop.
It occurs to me that this makes radiated or conducted heat from the laptop an unlikely culprit; I'd expect pain at the time of heat transferrence not a delayed effect.
Radiation on the other hand could produce such a delayed burn effect, right? Or not?
At the CPU/bus speeds these days, 2GHz processors? They must be emmitting some pretty serious radio signals, and very close like that the inverse quare law won't have blunted its teeth, so to speak.
Maybe, just maybe, modern high speed procs need radiation shielding for close-quarters use?
Heck, maybe Dubbya could have Saddam for possessing radiological weapons just for possessing a multi GHz proc or two...
oh that last quip was a *joke*
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
what a waste of energy. why generate heat, wasting your battery, only to throw it away. make the processors run cold, by LOWERING clock speeds and whatnot. nobody needs 3000000 gigahertz to run an editor or to email or to whatever. if you need the processing horsepower, put an optional processor that's usually sleeping but that comes on when heavy computations are done. it will heat up but that will get dissipated. oooooooooooh well.
I'll bet all of you are pubeless. Completely pubeless. Will Riker, you're pubeless and dorky. Harry Potter, you're pubeless and satanic. Einstein, you're pubeless, dead, and you have bad hair. Pocket Pikachu... well, okay. Nevermind you. Majin, you're pubeless, and ugly. What the hell are you anyway?? Mr. Trebek, what is "YOU ARE PUBELESS!!!"? James Bond: The Pubeless is Not Enough. The Pubeless Spy Who Pubelessed Me. I'd make fun of a few more of your pubeless movies, but those are the only ones I remember. SSJ, if that IS you're real name, you are the most PUBELESS person I've ever seen.
And don't get me started on the Cube. What more needs to be said? I think it's pretty clear that the Cube is pubeless. The name should be changed from "The Cube" to "The Pubeless Cube", because I've never SEEN a Cube that lacked so much in the Pubes department.
I hear that Corey Kosak is pubeless as well. Pubelessness is one of the major causes of pubeless homosexuals, experts say.
And Ayn Rand... let's just call her the anti-Pube. I've never seen a skank so pubeless in my entire life.
I don't see how the government allows Forum2000 to continue to operate. The last time there were so many fanatical pubeless people in one place, the FBI and the BATF killed them all "accidently." Hmm, well, sometimes accidents happen to publess people. Is there anyone on the Forum2000 staff that ISN'T pubeless? This makes me sick.
Pubeless, pubeless, pubeless!!
Even 4 years ago, their 7500 Inspirons had a clunk of metal with heat pipes going off it and to the back of the laptop where they were joined to paper thin fins with the variable speed fans behind them. I always thought they were filled with an evaporative coolant to pump heat back much like any standard heat pump. I think I was told later that the tubes were solid. But that someone would get a patent on this idea? Sounds too obvious. I'm surprised no one has come up with peltzier coolers for laptops...maybe they draw too much power though. If only we could turn the heat back into electrical...yeah, maybe a little gas turbine sitting on top of the CPU running a generator that feeds back into the battery. :-)
-lpq
We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely
intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people
think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be
best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with
the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand
and speak English.
-- Alan M. Turing
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