2011年7月7日星期四

Fanfare For A New Way to Fan Computer Chips

Heat is a big problem inside computers, not to mention the data centers that contain hundreds of them. A researcher at Sandia National Laboratories has come up with a new way to get rid of it.

The Livermore, Calif., lab calls the invention a fundamental breakthrough, with the potential to radically alter how computer chips and computers are cooled.

To gauge those pronouncements, it helps to open up a desktop computer and look for the key microprocessors or graphics chips that generate the most heat. In many cases, they are easy to spot, identified by an assembly with a fan whose air keeps the chip–and the system–from going up in smoke.

Such fans generate a lot of noise and consume a lot of energy, the headaches that Sandia researcher Jeffrey Koplow set out to ease.the Injection mold fast!

The fans don't typically blow directly on to a chip, Koplow says. There is often another component, called a heat sink, that has cooling fins that provide more surface area to help disperse the heat. Air from the fan is directed at those fins.

But there's a bottleneck, Koplow says. A layer of air clings to the cooling fins, creating a boundary that acts like insulation that resists the airflow generated by the fan.

"If you speed up the fan, that is going to disrupt the boundary layer, but it's a weak effect," Koplow says. "The fan gets loud and power hungry."

So Koplow came up with an entirely new design that exploits air and motion in different ways. In this approach, heat from the chip passes upward through a thin gap of air, which serves as a bearing for a spinning circular device with fins that acts as a heat sink as well as a fan.Shop a wide selection of billabong outlet products in the evo shop. Air can't form into a blocking boundary layer because it is thrown outward by centrifugal force, Koplow says. And the approach also reduces a build-up of dust that fouls many fans, he adds.you will need to get an offshore merchant account.

Koplow estimates one of his "Sandia coolers,Our Polymax RUBBER SHEET range includes all commercial and specialist" as the lab is calling them, can match the performance of conventional cooling assemblies at one-tenth the size. They are also much quieter, he says.

And computers aren't the only places they may be used; Sandia says the coolers could also play a role in building heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. If the technology can be deployed on a mass scale, Koplow estimates it could decrease overall electrical power consumption in the U.S. by more than 7%.buy landscape oil paintings online.

How and when might the market see the benefits? That will depend on the private sector; Sandia, like other national labs, licenses its inventions to companies for commercialization and is inviting them to consider this one.

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