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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."
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.
Caffenine is a bad idea for cold rooms. It makes your blood vessels shrink a bit, bringing less warmth to your extremeties. I never understood why computer geeks working in cold labs suck down the caffenine.
The heating was gradual. There's a pretty well known fact that if you put a frog in cool water, then gradually heat it, it will never jump out but be boiled alive. To a lesser extent our own sensory systems work the same; they react to differentials rather than absolute values.
In this case, the machine probably got warm, but not so quickly nor so much that it ever became really uncomfortable (and if your attention is fixed on your work, the threshold is even higher). Also, to some extent you can exchange temperature for time in getting an equivalent burn; ie. while something needs to be scalding hot to burn you with just a touch, it can be considerably cooler if it's in contact for a long period.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
This research is funded by the American tax payer. Why are they patenting it? Doesn't it belong in the public domain?
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
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.
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.
not only are we talking about a very small amount of liquid, we're talking about a liquid with a boiling point very near (if not below) the operating temperature of its surrounding components. This is important because it means any fluid escaping would most likley evaporate prior to contacting a component sufficiently enough to cause a short.
:-)
Or, here's a novel concept, just use a dieletric liquid. leak? who cares.
Like why doesnt the "hot" air get blown throught ducts that channel it up across the screen or better yet through a duct that meets when the laptop is open so the tiny fan blows the air across the back of the LCD so that it's startup to get to operating temperature is faster? this would be a boon to us techs that sit there in a fox hole with out laptop when it's 35 degrees trying to figure out why this fiber node repeater is not doing it's job right. (yes I get to troubleshoot my own fiber stuff.. It helps being the only IT guy in the company with confined space training and certification.. but then they let me play with the fusion splicer too.)
Or how about (GASP!) someone making a SMP laptop? a pair of mobile P-III processors with a modern OS will do the job quite nicely and cooler than the P-4 2.2ghz oven or the equilivant AMD blast furnace sitting there. (Note to the SMP naysayers.. W2K will take advantage of that SMP even though the apps you run will not. The same way linux has for years.)
and this heat thing is only going to get worse.... as we stop using batteries and start using fuel burning power supplies in laptops.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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