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

As an average Joe...

[suman28]

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.

Re:there's an idea...

[WPIDalamar]

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.

Re:Too late...

[JanneM]

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.

Re:Forget...

[penguinboy]

Turning energy into light isn't 100% efficient either..

Other uses for heat

[UCRowerG]

"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"

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.

Re:SUE

[iomud]

Everyone brings up that McDonalds case these are a few words from a friend of a friend that was actually involved in the case. While this was not 100% McDonalds fault they do share a burden of the blame for what happend.

For example, the structural integrity of a McDonalds cup is substantially decreased when it is filled with hot coffee. It is meant to be used with the top on it to reduce spilling and keep the cup in the proper form. Like many other people, the woman took the top off to let it cool down. By doing this she made the walls of the coffee cup much weaker. She didn't actually spill the coffee; the cup collapsed when she took it out of the cup holder. Before you laugh, consider that McDonalds deliberately created a low cost coffee cup with weak walls. It was argued that if the integrity of the cup was compromised by taking the top off, then the top should be fixed in place. Or, the walls of the cup should be thicker.

This would be like the heat sink on a laptop melting through the case due to poor and or frugal engineering. Deliberate intention to create a lower cost product without reguard for the safety of the person using it.

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

[evocate]

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.

Living in the future?

[FreeLinux]

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.

Re:My laptop is always very hot...

[Lumpy]

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.