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."

Comments

there's an idea...

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

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...

Re:Damn bluesky, its just an illuminated night sky

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:News... Why??? It's been done before.

[photon317]

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.