Slashdot Mirror
Aquarium Full of Oil For PC Cooling
JaredOfEuropa writes "Forget fancy watercooled CPUs or complicated heat pipes. Annoyed with the noise of the forced-air cooling in his computer, this guy simply dumped his entire motherboard in an aquarium filled with mineral oil. (coral cache). No modifications were necessary; he even left the fans running to keep the oil moving about. The only thing not submersed in oil is the hard disk."
So if this thing overheats, does it deep fry itself?
he only thing not submersed in oil is the hard disk.
:)
And what about the CDROM drive eh, eh?!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Mineral oil?!? I'll bet all his fish are dead!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This has been done before, as reported by slashdot almost six years ago. Of course, the guy in the '99 story used a styrofoam cooler, while the newer one upgraded to an aquarium, so I guess progress marches on!
I'll keep the convenience of clean messing inside my current, completely quiet, oil-free PC, anyday.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Wait, wait, wait... You are linking to the original site rather than the distributed cache to PREVENT it from getting Slashdotted?
New Headline: Slashdot effect causes need to change the oil........
'Nuff Said
Mineral Oil is not nice stuff
Did you see the parts about flammable and a respiratory hazard?
What's next? A guy who uses gasoline for liquid cooling?
May I recommend Fluorinert FC-70?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
wagter connducts oil doesnt
so it sucks if you want to use the unused slots
at a later date
Isn't a mirror kind of useless if it has to pull the images from the original site's server? Just askin'
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
What's next -
- PC kept lifted to tropopause to take advantage of constant -55C temperatures
- Armies of hamsters enslaved to turn multi-stage centrifugal fans
- PC strapped onto hood of 67 Camaro driven down freeway to maximize airflow
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The reason that you can't submerge electrical parts in water is the simple fact that water is electronically conductive given the presence of electrolytes (which is so hard to guarantee against in practice, that you can rest assured that water is bad.) Many oils, however, are not electrically conductive. Therefore, as long as the medium used is electrically inert and does not chemically react with anything you're submerging in it, you can consider it a viable medium for immersion cooling assuming that heat transfer properties are favorable.
This has been done before. Interestingly, some projects have looked to it for outdoor computer use (stationary) due to the water-repellant properties of many oils.
I saw a few years ago (probably here on /.) where someone put a MB into a tank filled with glycerin, then put an air conditioner cooler grid into the tank with it. A pump curculated the glycerin over the cooling grid and around the MB. I thought that was pretty extreme. I guess the main point is that you don't want something corrosive or conductive, and you do want something with a sufficiently high specific heat to take the heat away without cooking the board.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I'm an elevator Engineer. This reminds me of a very old residential elevator controller I saw recently that was installed in 1917 and still had all the original equipment in good working order. The controller was in a cast iron tub with all the relays mounted to the lid and suspended in transformer oil. There was a hoist in the ceiling to enable lifting the lid for access to the relays. It would cost a fortune to build something like that today, but it certainly was durable.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This thread is useless without pics!
There's not even a Google cache of the site. Oopsie.
For the curious, here's someone else who had a similar idea.
Why wouldn't they? Oil doesn't conduct. That's why it's used for cooling in electrical devices such as transformers, dummy-loads and such. I recall one vendor who demonstrated the high breakdown voltage of their oil by running a TV set in a vat of the stuff. Almost anything has better heat removal ability than air and for silent running it's not a bad idea.
There is still the problem of removing the heat. If there is enough surface area to allow the heat to be removed then you are ok, otherwise the oil (and everything else) will get too hot. Encasing everything in a metal box with fins on the outside would probably keep things even cooler.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Except that the fans are still on, which supposedly moves the oil around. And when oil at the surface becomes warmer than room temperature, the heat is disappated into the air, with much greater surface area than is touching the heat source.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Yes, you can use water. Any non-conductive liquid will do. Of course tap water is conductive. you would have to use a very pure distilled water.
The oil will certainly be more difficult on the fans, im not sure if it has any corrosive effect.
No, you can't use water because it will become conductive when almost any substance is added to it, such as the metal flakes coming off of computer parts, other microscopic contaminents, and even carbon dioxide which will cause the pH to change. On the other hand, mineral oil is a non-conductive liquid, there are several although mineral oil is definatly the cheapest. Also, water is corrosive whereas mineral oil is not. A while back there was an article about using 3M Novec 1230 (AKA Sapphire) for submerged cooling (the poster mentioned it but forgot to take into account the low energy needed for Novec 1230 to vaporize) read the comments for more info on why water will not work. FYI somewhere in there you can find a link to pics of a guy who tried using water and fried his UPS.
The guy uses vegetable oil not mineral oil according to his site.
I did this for a year or so using mineral oil, a plastic storage tub and a small dorm-sized fridge. I had a small electric pump that pumped mineral oil into tubing which was coiled inside the fridge (drilled and in and out hole on the side) and then back into the resevoir. I was a little worried about condensation but it ran fine for over a year before I got tired of the clutter and mess of it. I could have done it better but I didn't want to spend any money on it and just use what I had laying around.
It was mostly for fun with a few interesting things I learned from it:
* It allowed me to overclock about 30% more than I could previously squeeze out.
* The mineral oil did not harm the hardware at all that I can tell from a year of being submerged(it just was a pain to clean).
* If you have your resevoir higher than your mouse then your mouse will be full of oil in a few weeks (same goes for any component connected by wire I imagine).
* The only component I found that could not be submerged was a hard drive.
* The outside coating on the wires will harden and break away after being submerged long enough(but they will still work).
* There was no connection issues with PCI cards or any peripheral device that was plugged in even if they were coated in mineral oil(even jumpers could be changed while it was submerged).
* If a drop of some other liquid (that is lighter than the oil) accidently falls into the resevoir it will quickly be coated by the mineral oil and slowly fall to the bottom and can be sucked out (phew!)
Probably more but those were the most interesting things I remember of it.
Of course, none of that really matters, since the images are on a different server that neither Coral nor the original site are able to access.
I've got a mirror of the images building here. The server is dying quickly, but I should be able to complete the collection.
Even with no heat loss to the air, I've got 10 minutes per degree C raise, at 20 gallons of mineral oil and 200 watts of power.
It's probably moot because that's a ton of cooling surface area.
You might want to do a Google search on this term and see what is considered the "universal solvent".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
pretty much. here`s the mirrordot.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Some guys in Spain (http://www.sorgonet.com/torderawireless/nodo1mejo rado.html) already did it in 2003, and we at /. talked about it. Apparently it keeps on working.
m l?tid=193&tid=137
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/16/2023221.sht
As everybody says here: nothing [new] to see here, move along.
don't give up your day job for a career in heat transfer...
A large surface area (e.g., the sides and top of the acquarium) makes an efficient device for convective heat transfer to the room air. The mineral oil would certainly get warmer than the room air, but it would stay well below the temp of the PC components.
Given sufficient motivation, the steady state value can be calculated within a fraction of a degree. Lacking that motivation, however, a reasonable approximation is that the acquarium would be less than 10C above room temp.
then you could always make some killer fries by overclocking. i see no prob w/ that.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Sorry guys, I don't buy it. I've heated fish tanks larger than that, with a small heater (you know the little fish tank kind).
The ram, the CPU, the power supply.. they put out a LOT of heat, especially when taxed. As well, this oil is more dense than water. It will take longer to heat up, but it will also _retain_ heat longer as well. Water gets a lot of its cooling because of evaporation, which won't be happening to this oil..
Again, I don't buy it. I've seen others use external cooling methods for the oil. I'm quite sure he's never taxed this system.. or perhaps night time "cool down" is enough to carry him through the day...
I still don't buy that though. He probably uses it for a server or some such, after all... it's not a game machine, with a PII class CPU..
Can we do the same thing with water instead?
So *YOUR* the reason my Hairdryer has that warning label saying "Do not use while taking a shower". Wow, i thought you people were a Myth. =)
Flammable liquid coolants - just what a gamer needs. You thought using the flamethrower inside was only a way to die in Doom?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Would you like to supersize that order at Fry's?
he should make that sucker into a lava lamp
it would show/highlight the oil currents/flow by the fans (that are still turning, BTW)
whoah
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
The problem with using "very pure" water is that it wants to become impure in the worst way. It's astonishingly reactive stuff.. It will suck atoms of carbon, silicon, and copper off a motherboard in its quest to become impure. And then, at some point, it starts conducting, and you're screwed.
So, you're partially right- you could use very pure water (for a very short time) until it managed to eat enough impurities to start conducting again.
with the freakin' CPU cooling stories already! Every other day it's "some guy has invented a novel way of cooling his CPU using a recycled urinal flusher, some windex and half the periodic table. Download the 60GB MPEG to watch it in action!"
Yah- I remember an experimental F-5 radar that emitted 40Kilo Watts (take that, Pentiummmm!). It was about the cubic of a full tower ATX case. Aluminum case, machined heat sinks on the inside, the outside was mounted to a cold plate that was chilled with turbine bleed air. The R/T was mounted inside the case in a three dimensional kind of array of solid state and passive components. Fluorinert filled the cavity. Screwed the lid on, and it went to work. Heat flowed pretty well (thermal sensors built in to the circuitry at various spots) so straight convection was used (no fan, etc.). Worked great !
Assuming you meant water, the you're wrong. Just water is quite a good insulator.
The US Navy was using water cooled computers long ago. Just flooded all the circuit cards with distilled water.
Note that you have to do this with pure water. If you dissolve much of anything in it, then the SOLUTION begins to conduct.
Most of the water you come into daily contact with (puddles, rivers, flooded basements, even tap water) has quite a bit dissovled into it, which is why generally electricity and "water" don't mix.
Nothing says "nerd" like a PC dipped in a vat o' lard.
So what happens when the motherboard gets fried?
Installing Mandrake results in a default hostname of PekingDuck.
Two words: Debian Potato.
Installing Snort causes the room to smell like pork rinds.
Cool off your PDA -- grease a palm!!!
No, the oil doesn't make your 56k modem go faster.
Friendly reminder to change your oil every 3 months or every 3000 Megs.
Look up "Latent Heat of Cooling" and then re-read your post.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I'm surprised that the PSU and all the cables (like speaker/CAT5) work at all, I feel so uneducated.
Actually, I'd be more worried about the high-speed circuits in the machine. Oil does not conduct electricity, but that doesn't mean its electronically equivalent to air.
Oil has a dielectric constant of between 2 and 3 (depends on the oil) and that will affect the capacitance on and between the traces of the circuit-board. The signals will run a little slower on the board and have a bit more cross-talk. Its probably not a big deal -- the materials in the circuit board have a bigger effect -- but it could slow the signals enough to reduce reliability in a marginal design.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Someone did this a few years ago, but they pumped the oil over an air conditoner coil to get it even cooler, pics are awesome!
s ubmersion/submersion8.html
http://www.octools.com/index.cgi?caller=articles/
I'd say the biggets problem with this is making sure the plastic in all the components is oil-compatible, i.e. doesn't degrade or dissolve. The bottoms of most shoes do, as anyone knows who stepped in a puddle of oil in a garage. So why not plastic used as structural material and insulation?
Also, loading a fan by making it spin in oil might make it use more power than normal, possibly overloading and overheating either the motor or the drive circuit, though the better cooling provided by the oil could alleviate that.
wouldnt there be problems caused on the mobo due to the changes in capacitance between all the conductive tracks?
No, because the trace impedance is set by the dialectric between the layers in the motherboard - it's the dialectric constant of the PCB material combined with the spacing between the trace and the plane beneath it, along with the trace width. Whatever is above the trace, in terms of what would normally be free air, makes virtually no difference, particularly since the motherboards already have a conformal coating with a fixed dialectric constant anyway.
But there are probably plenty of other reasons why vegetable oil isn't so great for your computer.
-h-
However, This site suggests a 75 watt heater to keep a 20 gallon tank 18 degrees F above room temperature, or a 150 watt heater for 36 degrees F.
The computer probably puts out less than 150 watts total. Even assuming an 80 degree F room, that would put the computer at 116 degrees F, which wouldn't upset the computer at all. Granted, the heater you put in a fish tank has a thermostat, and so it's not on all the time, but your computer will not have any problems at 116 degrees F inside, and could go a good deal higher safely.
But I do agree with the other guy to respond to your post -- I don't see the fans even turning, let alone turning enough to move the oil around. Perhaps if they were cut down some ...
Of course, I have no idea how well heat flows through oil, or how well it's transferred from oil to the air. But I imagine that the heat generated is low enough for it to not be a problem.
While the aquarium may have less total area, the conduction of heat to the aquarium walls through oil is much, much more efficient than through air to the walls of an aluminum case, resulting in far better heat dissipation overall.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Or better yet, volumetric heat capacity...
The Good Eats episode on How To Thaw A Turkey did a great job of explaining that in layman's terms:
Cool running water melts a ice cube duck faster than a pot of water removed from the stove just as it started to boil.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
No, they aren't sealed. They do have a lot of filtering between them and the surrounding air, but they aren't sealed.
I don't think I'd want to buy any secondhand parts off of this guy.
Stickiest dust bunnies EVER.
And you could add 2 giant fans to blow air across the fins to keep it even cooler!
That is actually a good idea that really would make cooling more efficient. Larger fans can move as much or more volumes of air at slower RPMs than smaller fans. Lower RPMs means less wear on bearings and quieter operation.
IIRC that is the strategy used in the new BTX form factor cases--the heat sync on the CPU is really big with a lot of fins and a big fan that draws air through those fins and over the motherboard (to cool the chipset). Current ATX setups are most often laid out poorly for cooling, and you end up seeing high-end systems with 3 or more fans in the case. It is the need for multiple small fans that makes these PCs noisy, not the fact that they require fans at all.
I still think it would be great to see the return of the days when chips and power supplies ran cool enough to allow for practical convection cooling. My fanless Atari ST was blissfully quiet--even the comparable IBM ATs of the day that only had a single fan in the power supply were horribly loud next to it.
Its that density that has alot to do with it: more mass for it to offload the heat into per area vs. the air. Even if the fans were left off, oil is a much more effecient conductor of heat than air. To get straight to the point, the thermal conductivity (ie: how well it conducts heat) of air is 0.024Watts per Meter*degree Kelvin, vs that of Oil (machine oil in this case, but mineral will be on the same order of magnitude) at 0.15W/MK. Water would be better if it didn't tend to let the electrons go wherever they wanted, its conductivity is 0.58. The area of hot surfaces on the computer that are exposed is the same, since this is total emersion, and so long as the oil is moving enough to distribute the heat, the ammount of oil in the container is enough to serve as a decent heat sink, and the large surface areas of the top of the oil and sides of the aquarium would be sufficient for distributing that heat for the air to convect away.
How much heat this would work for would require thermo equations on the surface area of the exposed tank surfaces using convection (q=hA(dt)). h is the thermal transfer coefficient, and depends on velocity, density, geometry, flow pattern and a few other things, and since Im lazy Ill leave that as an exercize to the reader. Once you find h though (and for a flat plate like the aquarium walls and oil/air surface is, it should be easy), calculating the saturation point is simple.
been too long since I touched thermo...
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Oh, here is some nifty stuff from 3M:
Fluorinert.
Looks like nicely expensive stuff.
At over $500US for 250mL, it would take a princely sum to fill a fishtank....
As this is really a re-hash of an old story, I'd be more interested in what happens to these rigs over the long haul. How long does the computer last in oil? How often does he have to change the oil? How does he cool the oil? How long before the mobo and cards are somehow affected by the oil?
Answering *these* questions would make for a much more interesting article than just "Hey, dude, I put my mobo in oil! I'm l33t!"
So what about the connections in the PCI slots and such? Can't mineral oil get between the card and slot's contacts?
Do you have to keep the cards perfectly still to keep a strong contact?
Can you swap cards in the tank?
Can you adjust a connection (USB) while the machine is on?
I looked in the forums and nobody mentions this in english. Just stuff like "bloody brilliant"..
Look more closely. They're selling it by the MegaLitre (ML).
Why not do it at -40 next time; that way you don't have to keep all those F's.
Oil isn't even necessarily the best material to do this -- it's probably just the cheapest and easiest for a hobbiest to get hold of.
Liquid Fluorocarbon does an excellent job. The Ontario Science Centre used to have a great display of an operating television completely submurged in a small vat of the stuff. And fluorocarbon is effectively a plastic itself, and thus is harmless to plastics (unlike many oils).
Yaz.
For context, click Parent.
is that every last connection has to be SOLDERED DOWN in order for this thing to work for more than half an hour.
The problem the guy ran into six years ago was that the mineral oil seeped in between all of the connections and disrupted the flow of electrons; PCI cards, AGP card, CPU, IDE, power... everything. A stock motherboard simply won't cut it, you have to have a custom board with everything hard-wired to it to survive the submersion.
This story is a dupe because it doesn't solve the basic problem.
Actually, if you change the permitivity of the layer ABOVE the trace, you change the the "effective" permitivity of the transmission line (since e_r of oil is greater than e_r of air, you will increase the effective e_r of the transmission line). This will cause a net change in impedance of the transmission line. This cause cause havoc with timing. (check out "Microwave Engineering", Pozar) Just a thought.
Just imagine how efficently you could carry heat away if you submerge the motherboard in mercury!
Oh wait...
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
size weight and cost
for any non-trivial power dissipation a heatsink with a fan is a far better bet on all of those criteria than a passive heatsink
while some heat leaves a heatsink by radiation a lot goes by conduction into the surrounding air. Whilst that air will move away by convection to some extent this isn't exactly a fast process especially in confined spaces like a computer case.
fans make the airflow both significantly faster and more predicatable.
the only real problem with fan cooling in such applications is noise.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Radiative cooling does not work particularly well until something like 250C, few (if any) semiconductors would ever survive using this cooling method... most power semiconductors are specified for 125-175C maximum junction termperature while most logic devices fall in the 65-75C range.
As for fan noise, most HSF have this flaw in common: they place the fan immediately on the heatsink. Every time a blade crosses a fin, this messes up the airflow, generating noise and pressure losses which reduce effectiveness/airflow. Another common issue with typical HSF is that because the fan is directly on top, the heatsink's center is an air flow dead-zone.
I have not seen them for myself but Intel's orb-like P4 HSF and their BTX reference design seem like good examples of proper designs, they both provide some clearance and avoid dead-zones.