Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Don't get me wrong, an interesting thought experiment, but given the losses in power generation its not practical.
Agreed.
I think you would get more bang for the buck by improving the efficiency in the laptop components themselves so that they don't put out so much heat - which is exactly what is done. If you get a top-of-the-line laptop you'll need insulated pants to avoid 2nd degree burns, but if you get a new laptop built for battery life (and not performance) then you'll find it runs much cooler.
The reason for the heat bleed is that they are always rushing to get the fastest processor out - by the time they can make it cooler nobody wants it.
If one were to do the math, the wasted heat can't be more than a few watts at most, and there isn't a whole lot you could do with that even if you could efficiently turn it to electricity at a high enough voltage.
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.
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....