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Anyways its just a fan thats a heatsink. The term fan simply means:
any device for producing a current of air by the movement of a broad surface or a number of such surfaces. -Dictionary.com
What?The Sandia Cooler may also be the technology that smashes down the “Thermal Brick Wall” that is preventing computer chips from moving beyond 3GHz.
According to the whitepaper, heat conductivity across the very thin air gap ("air bearing") that the system maintains between it's moving and static part is quite efficient.The concept of how it moves air seems very plausible. The heat exchange between the CPU and the cooler is my concern. How do you maintain a thermal exchange then one piece is spinning and the other is fixed? It looks like a new type of thermal interface material would need to be used. This kind of technology looks promising, but it will need another new technology to make it work if I am understanding this correctly.
The concept of how it moves air seems very plausible. The heat exchange between the CPU and the cooler is my concern. How do you maintain a thermal exchange when one piece is spinning and the other is fixed? It looks like a new type of thermal interface material would need to be used. This kind of technology looks promising, but it will need another new technology to make it work if I am understanding this correctly.
Hey its still a cool innovation non the less. But what we need is CPU's made from organic materials, i.e. brain matter. All we have to do is tube feed it water and food an it will get smarter and faster as it grows in your motherboard but it will not generate heat at all.
Hell the human brain is so multithreaded and complex that all the computers in the world added together do not have the processing power of a 3 year old child. This was according to some Discovery heath show I watched not too long ago.
The measurements for the thermal resistnace of the air gap are right there in the whitepaper (they are quite low)
I still have my doubts though, a major basis for what's claimed as an advantage of this design is reduction of the boundary layer of airflow past the fins. This boundary layer is still there regardless if the HS is moving or a fan is moving across the HS. And reduction of this boundary layer (air flow velocity) is accociated with increased noise.
You seem to imply that there is no real difference, in terms of the boundary layer, between standard designs, and this design, and i would disagree.
The boundary layer exists because of general forces occuring between the metal and the air. I'm not going to pretend to know what those forces are, but they are there: i assume mostly friction.
The problem with moving air onto the heatsink is that what you are essentially trying to do is bombard the heatsink with enough air that you hope it dislodges some of the boundary layer. The upper parts of the boundary layer will get dislodged easier than the bottom areas, as they are better protected by the air above it. You end up with some sort of a force gradient; upper parts of the boundary layer are given a lot of force by air rushing past, but the lower parts get barely any forces applied to them at all. Furthermore, the boundary layer in this design depends completely on where that air being blown. Dead spots in the heatsink mean there is a constant thick boundary layer.
Wouldn't it be fantastic if instead of trying to push the boundary layer away with more air, there was some natural force that simply pulled and tugged on each air molecule equally away from the metal, regardless whether that air molecule was in the boundary layer or freely floating between the heatsink fins?
That's where this design comes in, instead of trying to push the boundary layer away with more air, something that, according to the designer, is ineifficient, he has found a way to tug away at all the molecules equally by using centrifugal force, something that does not occur on any conventional heatsink or radiator design.
So I would argue there is a major difference in the way the boundary layer is treated in this design, and also, the dimensions and shape of that layer are probably vastly different.
I'm still amazed though that that .001" air gap the heatsink floats on causes minimal heat resistance, when even a tiny air gap between the chip and a regular heatsink can cause terrible performance; perhaps another showcase of how bad boundary layers in static environments can get?
So the centifugal force applied by the fins onto the air has no bearing on it whatsoever?That's pretty long winded for someone who doesn't know what forces cause fluid flow.
You may not know, but I do. This is one of the cornerstone topics taught in a mechanical engineering program - boundary layers and heat transfer through boundary layers.
edit: I knew something was weird. They call it an impeller but they have the dang thing rotating the the wrong direction in the figure in the OP.
I'm reading the research paper.. I like it.
For those of you blindly bashing it, go read the paper. For those of you not interested in reading the paper, grow up. This thing has it's uses, and it certainly is an interesting idea.
And let me remind you all, he started this project in 2005. Those of you who can't count in years, think Pentium 4... At that time, there certainly was a 3Ghz limitation.
that is the correct direction.Are you sure? It should be spinning counterclockwise when looking at the figure.
I am referring to the fact that you can design an impeller that has straight, non angled, non curved vains radiating straight from the center, and you can spin this impeller in either direction, and it will stick suck air through the center of the impeller. The vains are constantly "escaping" from the linear travel from the air, because of the circle they must follow. From the point of the view of the air molecules, they are being pulled constantly outward relative to the impeller. A straight vained impeller wouldn't be as eifficient, but it would still work.Any "centrifugal force" is confined to the heatsink itself, otherwise I am not sure what you are referring to.
I am referring to the fact that you can design an impeller that has straight, non angled, non curved vains radiating straight from the center, and you can spin this impeller in either direction, and it will stick suck air through the center of the impeller. The vains are constantly "escaping" from the linear travel from the air, because of the circle they must follow. From the point of the view of the air molecules, they are being pulled constantly outward relative to the impeller. A straight vained impeller wouldn't be as eifficient, but it would still work.
It's the exact opposite of us humans standing on earth, instead of us being pulled inward towards the center of the earth, imagine we're all being pulled out equally, and desperately trying to hold on to whatever we can find. The other option to remove humans from earth is to bombard the earth with other humans and hope the standing humans get dislodged by this bombardment.
I'm reading the research paper.. I like it.
For those of you blindly bashing it, go read the paper. For those of you not interested in reading the paper, grow up. This thing has it's uses, and it certainly is an interesting idea.
And let me remind you all, he started this project in 2005. Those of you who can't count in years, think Pentium 4... At that time, there certainly was a 3Ghz limitation.
I guess I stand corrected. The 3.4GHz Northwood was released Febuary 2004.In the early 2000s intel had northwood c, p4s at 3.4ghz