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Liquid Metal CPU Heatsink Beats Water Cooling
unassimilatible writes "Bios Magazine is reporting that the world's first commercially available liquid-metal based CPU cooler is about to ship. Danamics, a Danish company, claims that its LM-10 outperforms standard air-cooled heatsinks and most watercooled systems with a mere 1W power draw. 'The liquid metal is a key component in Danamics cooling systems. Liquid metal has two major advantages when cooling high power density heat sources: Firstly it has superior thermo physical properties that decrease temperature — and temperature non-uniformity — on die and across chips. Secondly, the electrical properties of the liquid metal enables efficient, reliable and ultra compact electromagnetic pumping without the use of moving parts, shafts, seals, etc.' Awesome technology, if it actually works and is affordable. The submitter requests that the moderators terminate all T-1000 jokes."
There was a nice discussion about this in Firehose before this made it to the Big Page. A couple of the candidates for the liquid metal that might be used in this thing are environmentally neutral (bismuth, tin, etc.).
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
From my Firehose post:
It's mostly likely using Field's metal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field%27s_metal), Rose's metal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_metal), Galinstan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galinstan), or one of the other low-melting point low toxicity alloys, NOT mercury.
I expect it's a metal related to these, http://www.indium.com/TIM/solutions/liquidmetal.php which are used as thermal interface materials in machines like Apple's 8 core Mac Pros. The heatsinks on those are wetted with a little of the liquid metal in place of stuff like arctic silver. While working on Mac Pros I found it's like mercury, but sticks to the processor heatspreader and heatsink base. It's liquid even in a cold room. There's toxicity info on that site somewhere, but I'm in a rush at the moment. No doubt someone else will find it and post.
" Awesome technology, if it actually works and is affordable."
It works. It's worked for decades under the sea cooling nuclear reactors and in piston aircraft engines.
http://www.enginehistory.org/air-cooled_cylinders_3.htm
" During his early years at McCook Field the ever-ingenious Sam Heron had observed the characteristics of various sodium compounds which are normally used in heat-treating operations. These materials are solid at room temperature and become liquid at engine operating temperatures. He observed that since these compounds wet the surface of steel alloys readily and transfer heat very well, their use should be effective in extending the life of exhaust valves. The ancestor of our present-day sodium-cooled valves had arrived, thanks to Mr. Heron, and almost ninety years later we are still enjoying the benefits of his ingenuity though even today such valves are not completely fault free."
Also, it's not terribly expensive. Just don't go hacking into the reservoir or any of the tubes with a saw, mmmkay?
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BMO
Google is being of limited help here. The main link I'm finding is to Liquidmetal Technologies, which is producing Liquidmetal and Vitreloy -- zirconium-based alloys which are amorphous in structure (hence the "liquid" in the name) but are otherwise solid in appearance and use (and much stronger than stainless steel or titanium). This is not something one would be pumping through heat tubes to cool a CPU.
Obviously, mercury is out due to its toxicity. My initial thought was they're using metal bits in a suspension, but I have doubts as to whether this would actually do anything useful. Deeper searching yields this page, which describes a gallium/indium/tin alloy which is liquid at room temperature. Wikipedia'a entry for gallium concurs, saying, "It has been suggested that a liquid gallium-tin alloy could be used to cool computer chips in place of water."
Any materials experts out there care to comment?
For the lazy:
Field's metal
Rose metal
Galinstan
Maybe not
Galistan is liquid to -19 degrees C....
I doubt they're using any of those. Rose's metal uses lead, and the other two contain large percentages of indium and gallium, both of which are getting pretty expensive. Much of the world's gallium goes into GaAs and GaN, whereas the indium goes into indium tin oxide (or ITO), which is a transparent conductor that goes into all LCD screens.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
An alloy of sodium (Na) and potassium (K) is liquid from 12.6 to 785 C
it is cheap and wets most metals (good heat transfer)
it is a little reactive, so recycling would need some special handling.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Actually, the Fiero was put out by Pontiac (GM) and not Ford.
The game.
Actually, infoq.com does it this way too. Drives me wacko (fortunately, if you select plain old text as the option before posting in slashdot, it behaves normally. I just wish I didnt have to select it every fucking time)
Mod parent up - I was about to post on the same lines. Looks like all the likely candidates contain gallium, and gallium is not known to play nice to other metals - corrodes them etc.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Sillicon isnt a metal. :)
I'm not sure what the metal is either. At first I though they were talking about Liquidmetal(TM)
But they don't mention that it is those trademarked alloys. I still suspect it's another amorphous alloy (bulk metallic glass) even though that's not mentioned in the article and I haven't seen any other posts that mention that might be what it is. In any case, the Zirconium based Liquidmetal(TM) uses Zr, Be, Ti, Cu, and Ni. Here's the wikipedia article on Liquidmetal
I've done a bit of research on AA/BMG's but nothing with the thermal properties though
http://slashdot.org/my/comments
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I really don't understand why it isn't the /. default
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The Fiero had no back seat.
how about a link to the firefox extension that autolinkifies plain text urls?
That would be Linkification, now at version 1.3.5 and Firefox 3.0.x compatible.
Use a sealed system.
Galinstan can be pumped via magneto-hydrodynamic action throughout the sealed system- no moving parts and intrinsically nothing to wear out. Oh, and you very definitely do not want to use Aluminum in the system. It alloys away aluminum like Mercury does- disintegrates it FAST.
I don't think you'd want to use flex hoses, but a pre-built, rigid cooling system, using glass or certain copper alloys known to not be directly attacked by Galinstan like aluminum is and purge the air out and charge what few air gaps you have with argon, you SHOULD have a gem of a system. While it's thermal capacity is lower than water or mineral oil (Yes, I've done my own tinkering- including toying with an idea or two with Galinstan; unfortunately the stuff's just insanely expensive to have the volume of metal I'd have needed to do the idea- something on the order of about $1500 or so in the stuff...) it's thermal conductivity is right on up there with Copper and it effectively yanks the heat right on out if you've got enough heat exchange surface to dump the heat to. If you've got extremely high density heat dissipation, this might actually be an answer.
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