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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.
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
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.
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 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);}
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.
Sure, until ions are leeched out of the components, allowing a current to flow.
In a lab that I worked in we had water that had been passed through several kinds of filters and ion exchangers. You were good to go when the machine said that it had 10+ megaohm of resistance. We stored the water in clean glass bottles, but after about a week had to dump it because the ions leeched from the glass.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
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"
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.
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...
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!
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.
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
I've seen submerged mineral oil cpu boards before. Heck, here's one right here at the very top of the Google.
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.