Cutting Open a Heatsink Heatpipe To See Inside

An anonymous reader writes "Frostytech gets to the heart of Zalman's CNPS11X heatsink by cutting a section of heatpipe from the CPU cooler to inspect its inner composite heatpipe wick structure. Now that's an in-depth heatsink review! Interesting photos of the dissected heatpipe's composite wick — sintered copper powder on top and axial groove wick below — that you're unlikely to see elsewhere. In the late 1960s the first commercial heatpipes were used by NASA to stabilize satellite temperatures; now they stabilize multi-core processors."

Comments

Re:Where's the juice?

[Tjp($)pjT]

The working fluid is often water. Sometimes ammonia but usually not for electronics. It is under lower pressure so that its boiling point is near the working temperature of the device. Boils off or evaporates, condenses in the cold side of the heat exchanger, then capillary action sucks it back faster than it would otherwise travel to the hot side. My favorite heat pipe was a flat grill ... awesomely uniform temperatures. Not sure what the working fluid was. Other ways besides fans are to immerse the cold side heat exchanger into more water at normal pressures and that can have even more surface area to cool the reservoir making an effective heatsink area that is HUGE...

Re:But how does it compare to a solid heatpipe?

[AaronW]

They work much better. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe

-Aaron