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Sapphire: A Liquid That Won't Get Things Wet
eaglebtc writes "Tuesday on Good Morning America, a representative from Tyco Fire & Security demonstrated an amazing new substance called Sapphire: a water-like fluid that does not get things wet. He filled a small fish tank with Sapphire and submerged a book, a laptop, and a flat panel TV. Both electronics were turned on when submerged; all three items came out completely unharmed. Click here for a slideshow of the demonstration. The official name for Sapphire is actually Novec 1230. Read about it here (PDF). Tyco sees practical applications of Sapphire in fire extinguisher systems for museums and libraries. By the same token of practicality, regular readers of Slashdot probably have something else in mind: total-immersion watercooling. Just think of the possibilities!"
Offtopic, but the submitter opened the door: according to their specs sheet (PDF warning), this stuff has a boiling point of 49.2C (120.6F). Processors burn hotter than that, how useful would it still be for cooling purposes if it were a gas? I also have to wonder what the long-term effects of exposure would be... it's one thing to dunk a laptop for a few seconds, it's something else entirely to have it swimming all day long. At least your machine would never catch on fire.
;)
They might have some information there about how well the stuff will conduct heat, but I got a lousy grade in Chemistry, so I'll leave it to the experts.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
[...] a total flooding clean agent, which serves as an effective halon replacement.
So, in other words, a server room full of "Sapphire" will kill us just as fast as a server room full of Halon? That and the added entertainment of watching lifeless geeks float around behind the room's glass wall? My PHB will likely be faxing Tyco a P.O. this afternoon!
Trolling is a art,
Now I don't have to rub myself with ducks before I go swimming!
Perhaps I'll use it to fake my death by submerging myself in a bath tub full of it, then dropping a hair dryer into the tub and video tape the whole thing.
Hmmmm. This sounds like the fluorocarbons that we used to bathe the insides of Cray supercomputers with. They were pretty cool with little windows that one could look in and see "waterfalls" of fluorocarbon flowing over the circuitboards and components to keep them cool.
Of course we had to have an entire floor below us dedicated to refrigeration, but hey. Governments can afford this kind of stuff.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
If they're targeting it for fire prevention applications, not industrial cooling, then you can bet it's pretty pricey.
After all, 3M's not stupid: they price things correctly. These are the guys behind the Post-It Note.
What's your damage, Heather?
I'm no expert but if something's on fire, getting it wet is the least of your worries.
Yep, you are no expert. In many fires by far the most damage is not caused by the fire itself, but by the massive amounts of water used to put it out.
Casual Games/Downloads
Now I can give my cat a bath.
If you post it, they will read.
If they could make this available on Cape Cod, Ted Kennedy would not have to worry about explaining his drenched suits after he goes driving.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Wouldn't distilled water work just fine for total-submergion water cooling? After all, it's the ions in water that make it a conductor, correct?
Forget water that doesn't get stuff wet.
What we need is fire that doesn't burn stuff.
Sorry to say but this wont be a very good immersion cooling solution, the heat capacity of this stuff is WAY less than water, at least according to the info i could find on it. As well the toxicity is not something you'd want to be exposed to on a daily basis, i just feel sorry for that poor guy on TV who was blithely sticking his hands into the tank of this stuff and such, hope he doesnt need his liver for anything if he does this sort of thing on a regular basis.
drunk chemists
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why give a new substance the name of an older substance?
how to you clean it up? Or pick it up? Say, after it's been used to put out a fire? Or does some 'special' cloth absorb it?
-j
Mercury. May not be a good idea to submerge electronics in it though. And it's expensive, and toxic.
Does this mean that the liquid will be pissed out by an ice sculpture of David?
sulli
RTFJ.
There are a lot of things that are poisonous to humans in the environment. Being poisonous in large doses is not a problem.
The problems would occur if it is poisonous in small or cumulative doses, or if it breaks down into something that is. If it clears out quickly, and does no lasting harm (to humans, plants, animals, land, water or air) while doing so, it is environmentally safe. Just don't drink it.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
"I can't believe it's not water."
c++;
This was on Fark already. Read the PDF. It's stored as a liquid in the tank, but its a cyclic fluorocarbon that vaporizes on release. This is simply the latest version of Halon (TM) fire extinguishers, not an "non-wetting water" or an "non-flammable organic with a water-like viscosity" At work we have carbon dioxide jets in the server room in case of fire. We've never had the building burn down so I don't know the merits of either method.
This is of course not the first liquid that does not cause harm to electronics, and can be used for total immersion water cooling. Fluorinert (3m) has been around for a while. One version of it is(was) also used for liquid breething deep diving (same as used on "The Abyss").
main(i){putchar(177663314>>6*(i-1)&63|!!(i<5)<<6)&&main(++i);}
When he's underwater does he get wet or does the water get him instead? Nobody knows, particle man!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
And while their at it, have them eat 11 cups of soil and rocks. And if they curl up and die, it shall be concluded that the earth itself is not enviromentally safe. And that we should stop trying to save it.
I seem to remember hearing that the fluorinert they cooled the processors with was perfectly safe unless turned into a gas, in which case it was roughly as toxic as mustard gas. So, if there was ever an electrical fault in one of the machines that caused the coolant to boil off, there was a distinct possibility that you'd end up with a few dead operators.
Can anyone confirm/deny this? Actually, don't deny -- this is one of my best geek stories.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Except for the fact that after you remove the electronics, the Sapphire drips off and dries into the air (i.e. no rubbing required) whereas to get that mineral oil off you'd have to painstakingly open and isolate each part, and dab/wipe all that oil off. Not to mention that inert mineral oil would be absorbed into the fibers of a book or of a fabric, whereas Sapphire wont (which makes it ideal for fire suppression in libraries/clothing stores/repositories.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Even if you don't RTFA, you could at least look at the pretty pictures. They submerged a laptop and a plasma TV in the stuff while running, so that covers electrical. And since its intended use is fire suppression, its thermal specs must be fairly good.
It could be interesting for those geeks who are allergic to water...
Fluorinert does the same thing, and it's been around for many years. That's what was used in some Cray machines.
Hopefully this will work out better than their previous product "The Towel That Won't Get Things Dry".
>"Making bits hard to copy is like making water not wet..." - Bruce Schneier
Shit, here goes another argument against DRM.
It puts out a fire by cooling the combusting materials. The data sheet takes pains to point out that this is different from halon systems that deprive the fire of oxygen.
--Rob
They might have some information there about how well the stuff will conduct heat, but I got a lousy grade in Chemistry, so I'll leave it to the experts. ;)
:-)
A liquid conducts heat EXTREMELY well. You're thinking in terms of a solid, where atoms are fixed and have to transfer energy to each other. However, in a liquid, if one portion of the liquid is heated, this creates a stream of molecules in the liquid to disperse the heat. The heated molecules will actively move away from the heat source, giving room to cooler liquid molecules, which is a hell of a lot more efficient than normal solid-state heat conductivity.
Additionally, it has an heat capacitivity of about 1.1 kJ/kg/degree C, which compares to 4.2 for water. This means that 1.1 kJ (1.1 kW for one second) will heat one kilogram of the stuff one degree Celsius.
One can use this number for some interesting math. A normal box draws maybe 250W, all of which becomes heat. The density of the stuff is 160% of water's. I guesstimate that my tower will hold about twelve liters of water, or about 20 kg of this stuff.
(Note the scientifically correct notation "this stuff".)
Anyway, 20 kg exposed to 250W means that this stuff will heat by 0.75 degrees C every minute if the heat is not dissipated. Assuming a room temperature of 25 deg C, and an electronics-critical point of 45 deg C (the upper bound of operating temperature for some things I've seen; hell, some even have 40 tops), we have a span of 20 degrees, or about 30 minutes of operation until components are out of spec in their operating environment.
Again, this assumes that no heat is dissipated. A miditower probably has about 0.5 to 0.75 square meters of dissipating surface, with good heat transfer from this stuff inside.
Anybody knows if hard drives are built to operate immersed in liquid?
I wouldn't want to breath this stuff any more than I want to inhale octane, or anything else.
--Mike--
Rats, I spilled some. Well, I'll just use a towel to...
Hold on there, this is taking longer than...
No matter, I'll just get the mop and...
Sponge? No...
Paper towels? No...
Hazmat pellets? No...
I may be here awhile.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Not for long anyways, heres the rundown of tryed and failed experments:
-immersion in tap water: its conductive, one person was stupid enough to try this on his shiny new system, lets just say the power supply did somehting intersting.....
-immersion in distilled/de-ionised water: it gets contaminated by the computer and becoms slightily conductive, all the traces corrode.
-immersion in mineral oil: works for a few days but then stopped working with no obvious damage. Probily the capacitors soaked up the oil and that changed their electrical properites.
So theonly this stuff will work is if you use some kind os sealent on the board around the capicators and that might not even work...
"There was a substance that had similar properties produced in the past, but that fire suppression liquid was damaging the ozone layer. The new substance by Tyco is supposed to be environmentally safe."
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Boiling Point @ 1 atm 49.2 C
Heat of Vaporization @ boiling point 88.0 kJ/kg
Vapor Pressure 0.404 bar
This is a liquid that will readily evaporate (a little slower than ether would). If a limited quanitity is used (such as in a hand-held extinguisher), it will probably evaporate before you get the chance to clean it up.
The article also states that the LC50 is over 10% by volume, which tells this substance is probably not very dangerous, unless specific medical problems arise.
As it seems to be safe to the atmosphere as well, i guess the 'plan' is to just let it sit there and evaporate.
This may sound dangerous, but we do the same with CO2 - which is more lethal to anyone entering the room and possibly to the environment (global warming) as well.
Asinine is defined as "Utterly stupid or silly." Doesn't that disqualify true statements? Caffeine is more toxic than plutonium.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Well, I'm glad we cleared that up.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
But when will we have "Liquid you can drink and not be accused of modding on crack"?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Water is a danger. Personal story:
I had my apartment building catch on fire, but it was the floor above me. I thought things would be mostly fine, since the floors are fireproof. Well, a ladder truck was stationed outside my apartment, and if the newspapers are right, that truck shot about 1-3 million gallons of water that night (6 hrs to get fire under control). Well, that much water had a poor effect on my floor, and well, I was second floor. My living room fell into my downstairs neighbor from it. Not one lick of flame hit my stuff, but builing condition left my area condemned.
Moral of this story? Buy renter's insurance. It would have cost me $6-7 a month to get $5000 or more, and if I had started the fire, I would have been footing the bill for the whole building. I have a house now, and even if my mortgage didn't require it, I would have insurance.
Rule of the open mind
People who are resistant to change cannot resist change for the worst.
Since the book came out dry, it would appear that paper cannot absorb Saphire. Given that, how do you clean it up? It's not always convenient, or even possible, to turn the heat up to 120.6F.
It specifically states that it's NOT like HALON - it puts out fires by cooling vs. interference with fire chemistry (as HALON does). And it can also be used in "streaming" applications (like water).
Sean
Advantages: density 1.6X water, specific heat ~1/4 water. Disadvantages: evaporates easily, expensive. Unknown: Probably not good to breath for a long time, probably won't support mold/fungus growth.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
One problem. Try heating a frying pan with nothing on it. After you can sense that it's hot enough, sprinkle a little water on it. The water will float over the pan.
When the water makes contact with the hot pan, it turns to steam, which then insulates the remaining water above the pocket. The temperature of that pocket of steam gets quite high since it has little opportunity to escape and doesn't really get cooled. More importantly, the pan gets very little cooling effect from the water evaporation.
Therefore, you should never rely on coolant when any part of it is at or very close to its boiling point. The coolant properties of the fluid break down.
The above doesn't really match your example, since it's not immersed within a coolant environment. For a better example, use a boiling pot of water. Examination of the locations of steam nucleation reveal that those areas (however small) do not get wet, and gets insulated as illustrated above.
ice-nine
------------
Create a WAP server
Why would I use saphire, which is probably very expensive to appropriate, when I could just use mineral oil to do the same exact thing more cheaply? For those that are not aware, mineral oil doesn't conduct electricity either, although it *does* get things "wet". To be fair so does saphire, but the way it touches a surface is different, not unlike the way teflon touches things in an inert way. From what I hear saphire was invented for clean-room fire situations like at a data-center full of computers. This stuff will add an extra notch in the 99.9% uptime of any facility who has it.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Here is a possibility, we take celebrity heads, put them in saphire, so that in the future everyone can enjoy their wisdom, and entertaining abilities.
Until people started dieing off from being exposed to it. I think R-22 refrigerant has the same wonderful properties.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Also I believe the gpp is comparing apples with oranges. When you boil your kettle, these bubbles occur all the time but still the temperature of the heating element stays same until amount of cavity increases incredibly and the element heats up, the circuit gets open again. Kettles only have natural convection which is not enough to sustain the steady heat transfer between the fluid and the heating element.
I've seen submerged mineral oil cpu boards before. Heck, here's one right here at the very top of the Google.
If you put it deep enough in the fluid, the bubbles will condense on the way up.
However the shockwaves from their formation and collapse (cavitation) could cause physical damage to the chip packaging, especially where conductors penetrate it. If the chip package isn't designed for it, total immersion is proably out. Back to liquid-cooled clampons. (In which case, why not use water, which has extremely high specific and vaporization heats?)
If the heat of vaporization is anything reasonable, this should work quite well to remove heat from your chip--the fluid changing to a gas absorbs a bunch of heat,
But the heat of vaporization is extremely low compared to water - by a factor of 25! (That's why it can be "stored as a liquid and used as a gas" - the small amount of heat in the air causes a spary to immediately evaporate).
Specific heat wasn't stated - but with such a low heat of vaporization it is also probably low and/or doesn't matter. You're going to have to circulate this stuff REALLY FAST to get usable cooling.
Note that its use as fire suppression is not relevant to its use as cooling. Though this stuff DOES suppress fires by cooling (unlike halon, which interferes with the chemical reactions), fire suppression is a one-pass rather than multi-pass function. So the cooling can be accomplished by breaking up the molecule - using the heat of formation, in addition ot the the specific or vaproization heats, to cool the fuel. I doubt that you want to be continuously consuming your coolant and disposing of the resulting fluorinated alkyl radicals in your home system.
Also, I'm concerned about the toxicity.
This is being sold as a fire suppressant. Fires, and their combustion products, are SO toxic that a suppression system chemical can be quite hellish and still be a drastic improvement. But long-term exposure as an alternative to non-exposure is a far different can of worms.
One document touts that the LD50 (concentration that kills 50% of those exposed) and cardiac sensitization NOAEL (no observable effects level) - both ACCUTE (immediate) poisoning measures - are both "over 10% v/v". But another document, touting its rapid vaporization, point out that the equilibrium vapor pressur in air is four times that: 40% (nearly half the air replaced by vapor). And given how easily this stuff vaporizes, it can approach that damned quickly. So dumping warm coolant might quickly displace nearly half the air with this stuff's vapor and put you in jepoardy - of suffocation if nothing else. Not a problem if it's putting out a fire - BIG problem if it's not.
With that high vapor pressure and low heat of vaporization, exposure would tend to be very high during handling or in the presense of even a tiny leak. So if there are even small long-term toxic effects you'd want to avoid having this where it could result in repeated and prolonged contact.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Being a Mechanical Engineering by training I used this technology back in early 1990s while doing my undergraduate degree at Washington State University.
It is expensive as hell (at the time it was expensive).
It is by no means a new break through, unless they are considering the barrier of entry being no longer cost prohibitive as a break through.
"He probably heard about it from Rush"
Yes. It is buried somewhere in one of the later stanzas of their hit song "Tom Sawyer". As I recall,
"Today's tom sawyer,
He gets high on you,
And the space he invades
He gets by on you.
No, his mind is not for rent
Ted Kennedy swam in Chappaquiddick
in Cape Code, yet discontent,
He knows changes aren't permanent,
But change is....."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Some reactors (namely, Boiling Water reactors) run right at the boiling point. They use nucleate boiling at the surface of the fuel rod to break up a laminate layer that tends to insulate the rod from the rest of the water. In other words, the turbulance caused by the boiling increases the heat transfer rate.
If they had just put the same R&D into fire that doesn't burn, then we'd be all set!
I give men fish.
I was a small time firefighter for awhile, and we trained to deal with this stuff all the time.
:)
First off, you can put a fire out by using water to cover all the surfaces and deprive it of oxygen. One one fire the gire started in a basement room that was closed on all sides. We didn't get there fast enough to snuff it out at the point of origin. But the fire damned sure went out when we pumped the basement full. That's not the goal, but it works, guaranteed.
The ideal way of dealing with ordinary house fires is to get there fast enough so it's confined to one room. You advance a hoste team a bit into the room, set the nozzle to a 30 degree fog pattern and move thestream in a clockwise pattern thru the seat of the fire, up to the ceiling and back down. A few sweeps like that and a small fire will be out and you can get to work. At no time is the fire actually "drowned."
If the room is already mostly engulfed, you just crack the door, pump a bunch of fog in, and let your old friend vapor phase cooling suck the heat out of the fire. The only downer is that anybody in there is gonna cook for sure.
In our training burns we would start a fire in the tower, let it build up, and then run the hose team in. The boundary between smoke and clear air is actually quite distinct, i'd say no more than a foot high. When you cut loose with the water everything gets dak fast, the layer drops down, and life starts to suck. It does give ou confidence in your gear though. You have to experience it if you get the chance.
Theoretically you can put out a room fire without causing any water damage by putting in just the right amount of a fog stream into the room and letting all the water be vaporized. But fire fighting isn't ballet, and I've never seen it happen. Usually water damage is pretty bad.
One effect that can't be ignored is the mechanical force of a stream of water coming out of a hose. It can and will tear stuff up. If you spread out the stuff that is burning, stuff gets cooler and is easier to deal with. A nice straight bore nozzle hooked up to a good size pump can and will tear thru roofs without a problem. You absolutely have to get a hold of one of these things at least once in your life
This is so not my area, but Metal fires, Class D in the U.S., are only fought with powder extinguishers. Any extinguisher that isn't marked as a Class D is useless and a health hazard. One of the main reason you don't spray water onto a Class D fire is that you tend to get violent and explosive spalling. Life will start to suck in a big way if a moron tries that. It's a specialty area and any shop that workes with these metals, zirconium, and a bunch of others should put bucks into their training and safety gear. It's not to be messed with by amateurs.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
They used the Flourinert from 3M (link in another post). Drives are NOT submersed, only the Mobo, CPU and cards. Since it's the CPU, GPU, chipset and memory that really need the extra cooling when overclocking anyway that's fine.
The liquid Tech TV used cost over $900 US per gallon, so Saphire is just a cheaper version of the same basic thing. It's chemically inert (won't cause corrosion), non conductive (won't cause short circuits), and non toxic (fish can live in it if you add a standard aquarium air pump). Overclockers.com also has articles on submersion cooling.
I'm glad to see this, the only thing that stopped me from building an E-quarium (complete with fake swimming fish (no fish poop on my Mobo, thank you!)) was the price, since I calculated it would take three gallons to fill a recirculating system.
Tommy
Open Source for Open Minds
how useful would it still be for cooling purposes if it were a gas? Potentially very useful depending on the properties of that gas.
Of course!
More importantly, though, if the "water" is boiling because of the heat of your motherboard, it's undergoing a phase change - while it does that, it will consume all available heat to continue the phase change rather than elevate the temperature.
A pot of boiling water will never get over 100C until after all the water has boiled off (or if you increase the pressure, ie. a pressure cooker or a steam engine - PV = nRT!). Likewise, this will never let the processor get above 50C until all the coolant has boiled off. But if you capture the vapor, condense it, and drip it back into the computer's enclosure, you've got a closed system which is good indefinitely. I would worry, however, that if this stuff doesn't "wet", it probably has a lot of surface tension - so the "water" to processor interface won't be as tight as it would be with water, and therefore there might be a little more localized heating effects, similar to water droplets flying across a hot skillet. On the other hand, I'm sure the liquid, being capable of convective flow and in direct contact with the processor, will probably couple heat at least as well as a conventional heat sink. We should also look up the specific heat of this stuff. (Too lazy, didn't check to see whether it was in any of the cited links.)
Personally, I doubt you'd actually maintain the entire vessel at the temperature of the hottest component (the processor) - convective flow within the enclosure will move the hot "water" to the outsides of the container, where the surface area (thousands of times greater than the surface area of the processor) will couple away the heat to the atmosphere.
But why can't you do this with regular water? Submerge the motherboard and cards only - not the drives or the power supply. The thermal transfer grease isn't water soluble, so I don't think you'll make it into a conductive ionic solution. Voltages from pin to pin are pretty low, and pure water is a good insulator - the only problem is getting pure enough water, and keeping it pure enough. Corrosion will also not be a problem, again if the water is pure, the motherboard is continually submerged (preferably with a small surface area to the air so that less oxygen dissolves in it), and connectors are tin/nickel/gold plated - as most of them are. Wash the motherboard/cards/cables in distilled water before putting them into the bath, to make sure that you don't take any ionic contaminants (salts, etc. in dust, fuzzies around old CMOS batteries, manufacturing chemical remnants, little bits of leakage from electrolytic capacitors) in with you.
Components? Modern components are usually sealed anyway - the last step of manufacturing is removing the soldering flux, and that's usually done in what is, essentially, a dishwasher. They're not actually rated for immersion, but most of them do take a good spraying. I'd take out PC-board mounted piezo speakers, but offhand, I think that's the only part that would really have a problem with it.
I think I'd try this with an old computer before doing it with my real one. I seem to have an old 486DX-33 with 30-pin SIMMs and 16-bit ISA slots only... it's been begging for a job. I'll check out retail distilled water on my megaohm meter first.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.