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Sandia's Laptop Heatpipes Closer To Market
mckennabluedot.com writes "Laptops aren't truly portable until you can stand to sit with one on your lap for more than 30 minutes. Sandia National Labs has
developed small copper 'wicks' to transport methanol--and waste heat--from one area of a computer to another, where it can be dispersed more efficiently, comfortably and compactly than with heat sinks. The technology is being licensed to an undisclosed startup." So this stuff (mentioned here previously) might soon make it to a lap near you.
I'm probably going to be sterile from having my new Powerbook on my laptop all day long. It gets unbelievably hot.
I don't mean to sound like "that guy", but my iBook really does not have any problems with heat. I can set it on my lap for a good long while and barely notice any heat. This is one of the reasons that apple has not moved up to the G4 yet, so my computer is quite slow, but at least I never think twice about setting it on my lap for a game of mid-class Starcraft.
In the long run, we're all dead.
Is there such thing as computer heat that is not waste? Unless you are recycling the heat somehow, which seems unfeasable, it seems that all heat would be waste.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Remember that guy who burned his penis with his laptop? I bet he wishes he had one of these cooling systems...
Choose wisely you must...
I guy I know simply uses a chunk of wood (the size of the laptop) to seat his laptop in his lap. It not only gives it a more staple surface, but also allows him to sit comfortably without his legs overheating.
As for myself, I don't have a laptop. Anybody donating?
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
If you don't always buy the latest desktop replacement from Dell or whoever. My Toshiba Satellite Pro 4330, while getting a little long in the tooth nowadays (playing DivX movies and whatnot; I bought it in early 2001) doesn't break the 'quite warm' barrier and is comfortable for several hours of continued use, even when doing CPU-heavy things.
So remember, not everyone's trying to shove a desktop into a laptop and burning your legs off because of it.
If the heat isn't dispersed through the bottom, where exactly will it go? Are laptops going to feel cooler because the heat is dispersed better, or is most of the heat just going to be sent out of, say, the top of the laptop cover where it's less of a nuisance?
-- shayborg
The technology is being licensed to an undisclosed startup.
So THAT's what Dick Cheney has been up to this entire time!
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
So now I can have exhaust pipes coming off my laptop? Cool.
Can they be made to look like the pipes on a Harley?
Mmmmm chrome....
Huh?
I've got an older G4 Powerbook. It's too hot to put on my lap w/o my sketchbook underneath, but I don't know - I've never found typing with something on my lap that comfortable outside of heat issues as it is. Isn't this what tables are for?
Although I haven't received mine yet, I've read excellent reviews of the incredibly simple (and cheap) Laptop CoolPad. They offer Traveller and Podium (read: big and clunky) versions... Anyone had any experience with these?
Thanks, but I'll pass on this one.
Medium-rare and well-done are adjectives I'd just as soon not see applied to my goodies.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I'd like to see this option on Dell's site
* Upgrade to Gin or Vodka coolant $49.95
:wq
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!
but that takes away from the good ol' days of snuggling by the laptop on a cold winter's night, surfing the internet wishing the laptop was a woman and the heat source was a real fire......*sigh*......im lonely...
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Whith all these heat sources and readily available combustible fuels around its only a matter of time before one of these computer heads is gonna get torched.
Now I find it acceptable that a computer can heat up somewhat during computationally intensive functions, like performing a huge batch job with Photoshop or something, but what annoys me a lot about this fan thing is that it seems to come on at the darnedest times. For example, if some application crashes, the fan comes on, then goes faster, then goes even faster, and finally it's spinning at its maximum speed, which sounds like a bunch of banshees flying around when there are heavy winds. All of this while the computer remains totally unresponsive to any input.
This has annoyed me so much on many occasions that I often consider disassembling the computer and removing that stupid fan. Yeah, it'll overheat, but at least I don't have to listen to that shit.
My suggestion, as far as heat is concerned, is that laptops can be built utilizing processors that use little energy and stay cool. Yes, these are much slower than your Pentium CXXVCVXIIIXCIX, but if you put about 5 of them in there, it won't be so bad. In fact, it might even be a bit faster in some cases. I wish people would consider that. What annoys me the most about this is that the computer seems to heat up during computing-intensive
You will have done a good deed, and have the satifaction that some Minnesota girl is removing some of her clothing while using your old hardware. After me, that is.
Wait a sec... isn't getting all hot and bothered down there supposed to be a good thing?
What? It's not? Do what with a girl?.....ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh I get it! So you're saying I've had it all wrong all this time? Damn...
Blockwars: a realtime, head-to-head game similar to Tetris.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Steam? Steam. Steam! Steam.....
That being said, my previous laptop (or craptop, as I like to think of it) was a Dell 8000 series. Not only did the thing weigh a metric ton, it also produced enough heat to fry eggs.
The only thing I sorta regret with my current laptop is the lack of screen real estate. However, given that the screen size on the Dell actually prohibited me from opening the thing up all the way on an airplane (unless I was in first class), and the travelling weight of my current laptop is less than half (nearly 1/3)of the Dell, it's a trade-off I'm more than willing to make.
Heatpipes? I wonder how many people are going to find this story while searching for .. uh.. adult stories.
Maybe someone will create a heat-sink mod that transfer the heat to a tiny griddle instead.
Mmmm....laptop steak.
------
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I want to make it clear to everyone here that any reference to the "glowing cyber balls" story, however indirect, is strictly forbidden in this forum.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Sounds awful like the heat pipes that NASA developed in the 60s to cool sattelites
This laptop heat cooling design uses very very small tubes, about the size of a hair folicule, to transport methane around...
So, let me get this straight... if I scratch my laptop, it will bleed!? Hmmm...
I have this crappy IBM ThinkPad. It MUST wiegh at least 13 pounds and its battery nw lasts about 15 minutes..... Its the uglist peice of crap the universe has ever produced....But i still use it =)
I refuse to get in iBook, it just SCREAMS "I'm a fruit." I need something ugly, like another thinkpad.....
In the case that you're "citing" (I use quotes because you obviously don't know any of the facts.) the coffee was served at 180 F. This is quite a bit hotter than one expects to receive coffee at. For a fun experiment, try brewing some coffee and taking the temperature of it. Your experiment won't yield coffee at this temperature. Second of all, the McDonalds outlet had received over 700 complaints about their coffee being too hot. Other McDonalds have not and do not receive this many complaints about their coffee. It was partially because of these complaints that McDonalds was found negligent - they had plenty of information that the coffee was too hot but chose to ignore it because it was considered better for business to keep the coffee hot at all times so fewer fresh pots would have to be made. Furthermore, the woman in question (79 years old when the incident occured - your typical "victim" looking to get rich quick, right? Oh wait, she'd never filed a lawsuit before in her life.) received third degree burns on her groin, thighs, and buttocks. These burns required skin grafts and an extended stay in the hospital. The woman racked up medicals bill as a result of this. The award was also reduced from the original 2.6 million dollar settlement to 480,000 dollars.
Understanding law isn't quite as easy as just reading some headlines Mohammed.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
the lcd imac (and i think the Tibook aslo) already uses heat pipes. sandia is way behind.
Funny. Not as many references to the burnt genitals story as I thought there would be.
This might be an ignorant question, but what happenes if you tilt it. No, granted, its sealed, but what if for some reason, you have it operating at some angle or you have it upside down. I realize this is not terribly common of a problem, but nevertheless. Probably a stupid question anyway.
My Dell laptop has heat pipes to move heat from the CPU out to a radiator in the back. Maybe this is more efficient than the ones we already have? I couldn't tell from the article.
This was developed by the government using tax payer dollars. How can it be selectively licensed? I can understand the government patenting it and licensing it free, or under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but to an undisclosed start up? Are the members of the start up employees from the lab?
Doctor, doctor, my laptop's burnt my penis!
The bodies of the thousands of innocent civilians who died (and will die) in these unprecedented events could give a good god damn about obscure science fiction, your childish Lego models, your nerf toy guns and whining about the lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D fixation, the latest Cowboy Bebop rerun, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life" (here's a hint: watching Cowboy Bebop in your jammies and eating a bowl of Shreddies is *not* "getting on with your life"). The souls of the victims are watching in horror as you people squander your finite, precious time on this earth playing video games!
;)
I hate to say this but uh... if this is the case, those video gamers are squandering far less of thier life than those trolling slashdot.
Methanol is a highly reactive, flamable, and toxic chemical. You thought spontaniously combusting laptops were bad before? Now're you're carrying around rocket fuel to boot. I wonder if they'd even allow one of these on an airplane? It can be absorbed right through your skin and cause permanent eye and liver damage. I don't understand why they can't use a less flamable/reactive/toxic alcohol, like ethanol or isopropanol.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I hope they can extend their technique to ethanol. And make it work for humans. Then we'll have a killer.
Is this possible to use this heat (for recharging batteries for instance) instead of dispersing it.
It is energy after all.
The heatpipe attached to my Athlon cpu works pretty well. The temperature drop after replacing my AMD fan/heatsink combo was between 5 and 10 degrees C.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They have thought of redirecting the heat for "hand warmers" but one of the things heat pipes really buys you is lack of moving parts and fan requirements... in other words, you can use it for silent or even a waterproof computer.
Ok so cooling down the CPU will make it more comfy on the lap, but with gigahertz plus CPUs shouldn't we be worried about the radiation???
That guy whos penis was burnt... he apparently didn't feel any heating up and the blistering ocurred some time after using the laptop.
Doesn't sound like heat burns to me; more like the sort of thing radar techos used to get in the days before people figured out that you shouldn't stand too close to an active radar system...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Just lift the keyboard up on the tibook and you'll see five heat pipes running away from the processor heat sink. They go to various parts of the computer, and usually end bonded to a metal plate with holes in it, to dissipate the heat. I don't know if these are the same type of heat pipe the original poster is describing, but they serve the same purpose.
:-) That was a really good idea.
:(
My previous powerbook, a 1998 "wallstreet", had no heat pipes, but used the keyboard to dissipate CPU heat. The back side of the keyboard was aluminum, and sat squarely on top of the CPU heat spreader. It made for a nice warm toasty feeling on the fingers while gaming with it in the winter.
The problem the powerbooks have with heat seems to be the video... people always seem to forget that heat source in laptops. In both the ti and the wallstreet, that heats up the BOTTOM of the computer. I wouldn't even think of playing UT with the computer on my lap. The wallstreet had an interesting design on the bottom in that the sides where your legs would be were plastic - the center was the aluminum heat plate, and if you set it on your lap with your legs spread properly, you were free of any heat issues. Another excellent design idea not included in the new TiBooks.
I don't see a serious heat issue for most powerbook users. I'm sitting here typing up this post and I have, on average, one of the 19 bars lit up on my CPU monitor. The bottom of the tibook is only pleasantly warm to the touch, certainly not hot by anyone's opinion. I don't have any of the "power cycling" features turned on either... I'm sure it'd run even cooler if I enabled those. Now if I started ripping MP3s and compiling, the processor would get busy and the fan would spin up and she'd get warm.
How do PC laptops handle various workloads? I've used a few awhile back and they all seemed to be just as hot no matter if you were or weren't doing anything with them. I also noticed that if you pluged them into AC power, they'd crank up their CPU speed and get a lot warmer.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Huh?
what is compact heat dispersal? If it means all the heat is move to a small area, isn't this the problem in the first place?
You must be thinking of the Old-School candy-colored iBooks. I have one of the new all-white G3 800 iBooks, and everyone thinks it's really nice looking, and very elegant. OSX is damn sweet, too. You really should look into one. Here is a good little blurb of info on them.
:P
I mean really, you should think different
Oh, wait, you refuse to get IN ibook...i agree there, it looks kinda cramped inside as the CPU part is only an inch or so thick.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
But on my laptop, the major source of heat for me is from the SO-DIMM expantion compartment
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"Laptops aren't truly portable until you can stand to sit with one on your lap for more than 30 minutes."
I can't take a laptop anywhere because it gets a little warm? What about putting it on a table?
Ace
Awww c'mon, copper tubes are lame. That's a thing of the past. What I'll be impressed with is when they come up with a nanotube heat shielding system to protect your genitals from accidental frying.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I've played Q3A for over half an hour on my Latitude CPx while sitting in a car before. It doesn't get that hot. Perhaps we should all go buy from Dell!
-Dae
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
This is all well and good, but what I'm really waiting for is for them to do this with coffee cups. That way, I can drink from a coffee cup with exhaust pipes ...
... if I drank coffee, that is.
-Dae
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
How about LiGNUx? Lignux. I might even have a silent 'g'.
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
I have a Compaq 2100 series laptop and it barely gets hot unless I leave it on in full power mode for a good 3 hours. Heat disapation isnt all that bad, it is the design of the specific laptop that matters.
This reminds me - does anyone know how to check the processor temperature in os x?
c-hack.com |
Heat pipes have been around for years, and used on laptops for the past 5 years.
You still need a heat sink, all you are doing is moving the heat from one point to another. Unless you can dissipate the heat at the other side, no heat will move.
Why can't the heat be used to recharge the battery and give it a longer run time? Seems like this just throws away energy...
Still waiting for somebody to combine heat pipes in a laptop with a micro stirling engine for keeping those batteries alive a little longer.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I don't see what the big deal is. My IBM T20 gets no more than a little warm, even when doing CPU-intensive stuff.
One of the problems is this stupid race to the most megahertz. Hardly anyone needs a computer that fast, let alone a laptop. How many of you are doing 3D rendering, professional Photoshop work, or heavy duty web/database serving from your laptop? The first two practically require a CRT, the third just doesn't happen in the real world. And wanker gamers don't count...
NO MORE MONKEY MONKEY BUSH
I figure that is why some companies call it a notebook and not a laptop. If someone can sue over the coffee being too hot at McDonald's, then I'm sure they might have a case when there "Laptop" burns their leg.
My Inspiron 3700 is a couple years old, and has a heat pipe & braid.. So what gives?
Bowie J. Poag
Let me get this straight, they developed this tech with my tax dollars, and are licensing said tech to a company(probably some ex-employee) to make a profit off me, for R&D I paid for in the first place. Yeah, that makes sense. They should release the tech and let the best implementer win.
Banned from moderation 01-27-2002. Fuck you too
You know, there is an element of thruth to this. I was just thinking the other day: I think I want an iPod (about $400). Then I though, man I could donate that instead and feed a dozen people. Bothered the hell out of me. Still does. I decided that the world sucks and I just gotta live my life, so I got the iPod. But a dozen people...man, I hate myself that I can justify that...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Quite suprised to see no one is connecting the two separate but obviously related disciplines of research. This is /.
Fuel-Cell Power With Methanol
So it would be interesting to see how these two areas could be combined or at least cross developed.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
That's what I use for my Dell Inspiron 8200.
BTW, Sandia's way behind. Dell has been using heatpipes for close to two years (Maybe longer. The I8000 has heatpipes, so does the 8200).
And yes, they're wicked heatpipes. Non-wicked pipes don't work when the heat source is above the heatsink, but my Dell works fine when tilted backwards.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The amount of microwave radiation emitting from these things is insignificant.
For one, only the CPU core is running in the GHz range. This is a very small area, and doesn't make a good antenna.
For another, almost all of those high-frequency paths are terminated. As a result all of the power goes into some sort of load (Often the gate of the next transistor), and gets converted to heat and not radiated as RF. You can confirm this by measuring the power input of a CPU and its heat output - Almost all of that power is being turned into heat, so where could RF be coming from? Let's not forget that the heatsink (or heat pipe evaporator) and other parts of the machine make good RF shields.
People make way too big of a deal of RF exposure. Trust me, if it were as dangerous as the "cell phones cause cancer" crowd made it out to be, most of my coworkers would be dead or extremely sick. But they're still healthy even after quite a number of them have been working on RF power amplifiers for 10-20 years. We're regularly exposed to far more RF than a cell phone is likely to emit in our development labs without any problems at all.
BTW, it's more than possible to run modern laptops on your lap if you know what you're doing. In the case of Dell Inspirons, do a search for FanGUI. The BIOS fan speed settings for the Dells are quite agressive as far as maximizing battery life/minimizing noise. (i.e. the CPU has to heat up to around 60 degrees C or more for the fans both to be turned on at their "high" setting.) FanGUI (And a similar tool for Linux) takes over and manages the fan speeds, sacrificing a little battery for much lower temperatures. With FanGUI, I can run full-speed on AC with the unit in my lap without a problem.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
You probably shouldn't reproduce anyway!
"This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time."
C'mon, most /.ers are so sedentary that the odds are they don't even HAVE laps. I know I don't.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
we enjoy the lap distribution of the heat!