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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."
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.
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.
...
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.
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...
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
Or your skin.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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!
There really isn't much liquid in these. If you shook one, I doubt you'd even hear a slosh. The heat pipes work by adjusting the pressure in the pipe so that the methanol is teetering between liquid and vapor state. So technically the heat pipe moves methanol "steam", and the liquid at any time is measured in droplets.
They work most efficiently in a vertical configuration (warm vapor rises, cool droplets fall), so Sandia's work is very useful: they are developing more efficient ways to transfer the liquid back to the hotspot in a horizontal configuration, via capillary action instead of gravity.
...
Jesus! After reading on, it becomes apparent that it's not a wind up, he genuinely made his PC watertight, and filled it with water! Talk about running gung-ho into something without doing some research first!
This guy is the stuff of legends. If he had touched the case and died from the electrical shock, we'd be reading about him in the Darwin Awards!
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
The same applies to car engines...a large portion of the engines workings are to remove the heat it generates. If you don't manage the heat, you get faced with an expensive repair bill.
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 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.
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?
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
...who cares?
Me, because the processor will now burst into flames.
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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.
Oops. Too funny to be true I guess.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.