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Quiet Cooling With a Copper Foam Heatsink
Zothecula writes: The Silent Power PC is claimed to be the first high-end PC able to ditch noisy electric fans in favor of fully passive cooling. In place of a conventional fan, the unit uses an open-air metal foam heatsink that boasts an enormous surface area thanks to the open-weave copper filaments of which it's composed. The Silent Power creators claim that the circulation of air through the foam is so efficient in dissipating heat that the exterior surface temperature never rises above 50 C (122 F) in normal use.
And you can keep the pots and pans clean!
... for a dust free room!
This is not a real product. It's just being crowdfunded. The only evidence that it works is a claim by the creators that "the exterior surface temperature never rises above 50 C (122 F) in normal use", without specifying what "normal use" is.
It might work and if so, great! I can't trust this article at this moment, however.
basically means that for slower airflow, you need larger gaps for air to flow through. This is why the sponge is bad for heat dissipation, and great for insulation. It's kind of intuitive, but it's nice to have some science backing to it. Having a large surface is good, but it doesn't help if the airflow across the surface is limited.
On a side note, I've been on a quest for quiet cooling since the very early 2000s, incidentally after getting a physics degree. It's mostly in the last couple of years that I've started to see really sensible coolers in the general market. For example, the usual CPU cooler in the olden days had a fan pushing right against the CPU with minimal fins in between, meaning there's a considerable high-pressure centre with no airflow. No one with a fluid mechanics 101 would design crap like that. OTOH, the traditional CPU/mobo setting is a little problematic; first you put the most heat-concentrating element in the middle of everything, and then later you realize it needs cooling. (I'd put the CPU socket on the reverse side and use the case as a huge heatsink...) Now finally the designers have the sense of using a straight sideways airflow, combined with heat pipes. Why the fsck did this take so long?
I used to strive for pure passive cooling, but in the end I don't mind a large, slow fan -- it's enormously better than no fan, and still indistinguishable from other background noises. This is another nice thing to see in cooler designs, from the 1-inch whiner in my first Linux laptop to the 140-mm quiet giants that can easily manage a couple of hundred watts of GPU.
BTW, if you ever need to explain somebody how a heat pipe works, take them to a sauna.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.