For the people who don’t want to read the article or paper. The new cooling system is being compared to other passive cooling systems, not active cooling systems like you would have in your desktop or laptop.
Hard pass
Salt water sitting right next to sensitive electronic components?
WCGW.
When things go wrong it decreases computer performance by 100%
This is a solution looking for a problem.
Some people want molten salt reactors too. Some people just like living on the edge.
Yeah, how dare we want cheap, reliable, environmentally friendly power that works in the dark. The nerve!
Salt + Metal + Water + Another Metal = Corrosion
I’m sure the scientists and engineers never thought of that before they started this project. Really valuable contribution.
This is lithium bromide salt, absolutely nothing like sodium chloride salt.
This looks interesting. I have no doubt that their numbers have been chosen to seem a little more impressive, but it’s an interesting idea for a “evaporative heatsink” in this way.
The main issue would probably be the humidity coming off this thing while cooling, so it would probably need an engineering solution for to keep the pad exposed to the atmosphere but the components isolated from the humidity. That would probably only really be practical for larger scales like servers etc, so this wouldn’t be in home PCs anytime soon.
You could collect the condensation into a cup that you can drink and then pee back into the system. Cycle of life.
This isn’t for home PCs. Or, indeed, for anything you’d recognise as a PC. It’s for low heat loadings and low powers, where it outperforms other systems.
An evaporative cooler is not new, the difficulty has historically been that the performance drops off a cliff once the coolant fluid has evaporated. This system solves that by using a hygroscopic lithium bromide, which will absorb water from the air.
This means it isn’t for extended duration operation, since any hygroscopic capture is exothermic, the salt would heat the surroundings (e.g. the CPU) while it is capturing water. Condensation like this is evaporation running in reverse, with all the thermodynamics that implies.
In this case, you get 400 minutes of operation at very low power densities, a 60C result came from 2.4 kW/m^(2) which is something like an order of magnitude lower in power density than a PC CPU, but similar to a mid-range smartphone SoC, though this is not an intended application.
They’ll be useful for electronics in remote areas where fans and heatsinks could be clogged with dust and a self-recharging evaporative cooler to take intermittent power bursts (e.g. an environmental monitoring station transmitting its data back daily) and then recharge itself from environmental humidity.
I still was holding out hope I could mix hobbies and have a gaming PC and salt water aquarium set up together.
“Damn shrimp are stuck in the GPU cooler again!”
My sincerest appreciation for the invitation to this weekend’s lobster boil, but I’m afraid I must decline on moral grounds.
Thanks for the information.
Of course it’d be for some random unorthodox rig setup that no one is using.
They tested it on an actual computer. Did you find the specs of the computer they tested it in?
The “real computer” they tested it on was a Exynos 5 mobile phone chipset from 2014. The product was essentially a different type of Raspberry Pi. The improvements are measured against the typical metal fin heatsink that does passive cooling.
I think Linus from LTT tried something like that recently with his phone
Only lasts 6 hours , I need more than that
Yes, except for when the cooling system fails.
Then you have salt combining with electronics.
Ahh salt water not sea water. Lithium bromide solution
Great, so not only will the super rich be fighting for property on the coast…corporations might start plopping data centers there for the moisture absorption??
Pretty cool tech though…seems like basically a swamp cooler for your CPU.