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.
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.