Hmm, high tech twist on an old idea
Looks just like the partial vacuum heat pipes that have been around for a long time - with some added nano-stuff.
General Electric nanotech scientists have have come up with a heat-conducting system that's more than twice as efficient as copper yet has a quarter of the metal's weight. The design paves the way for faster, lighter computers and mobiles, the company claimed. The system can be laid on top of a chip - and pretty much any …
Um...video card coolers (notably the Radeon 69xx series) use a "vapor chamber" tech for their heatsinks. Evap on the chip side, condense on the radiator side. The only "new" tech in this GE research is the nano-bits on each side and the wick in the middle. The actual usage of evap and condensing is old tech.
Nothing says top-o-the-line laptop like a jet of live steam shooting out of the side of the case.
This could make the goolie-cooking battery look like child's play in comparison, but this time it will be the person in the seat next to you screaming "Lawks a Lordy my 'nads are afire!"
Two thumbs up.
The biggest one is the need for an electric motor to power the compressor. The compressor is key as it pressurizes the heated refrigerant and raises its temperature above room temperature, encouraging it to give up its heat before it begins the cooling cycle again at the restrictor.
This tech seems aimed at condensing the heat exchange system and designing it so that it doesn't need as much power or space to run effectively.
Not really, because the fridge recondenses the refrigerant round the back where you can't see. It just moves a small bit of heat somewhere else (while making it very much hotter).
The laptop not only boils the water, it shoots it out of the case. It is more akin to the Apollo Command Module heat shield in operation (only there it was solid to liquid phase transition with the hot liquid being blown away).
Of course, if your fridge leaks its refrigerant, then yes, it is just like the laptop cooler.
The main issue that I can see working against this live-steam nad-cooker is that eventually the sponge must dry out, at which point the cooling effect is abruptly offline. Will there be adequate control systems to scram the processor in the event of coolant starvation, or are people once again just crossing their fingers and hoping there won't be a meltdown?
Also, I have concerns about these laptops turning aircraft into flying turkish baths. I've never been in one, but I am highly suspicious of them on principle.
And what about the threat of mildew in the carry-on luggage?
This technology seems to raise more questions than it answers.
When you scale down the heat pipes you have to scale down it's components. Note that normal scale heat pipes have been described as having a thermal conductivity 600x that of an equivalent thickness Copper bar, so only 2x is not very good (but one of the issues with this sort of micro/nano engineering is the unexpected *highly* non-linear scaling effects. The point at which "drops" of water are more accurately clusters of water molecules, for example).
"Phase change." Would it seem less high tech if we called it "boiling" and "condensing" instead?
Because that *is* what is happening,
I'm guessing (because lets be frank this is not a very tech article) a *lot* of the clever stuff is the *manufacturing* of the thing, rather than the idea itself.
The *implication* would be the pipe (or pipes) mfg process could be *integrated* into the chip fab process itself. Chilling out those monster power transistors on RF or power devices, as well as keeping the SiGe Copper interconnected processor cores of your next gen processors from meltdown
*if* correct, that would make it as big a step forward as the introduction of Copper (by IBM) as an on chip interconnect and SiGe for very fast chips.
*potentially* a gold mine if GE can get the IP licensing deal right.
Mine has the PDF's of "The MEMS handbook 2nd Ed" on a reader.