Is the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger the future of CPU cooling?

[siopao1984]

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Is the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger the future of CPU cooling? by VR-Zone.com

An outfit called Sandia National Laboratories has developed something called an "Air Bearing Heat Exchanger" or as they like to call it, the Sandia Cooler and it's said to change the way we cool our CPUs. The name is a lot fancier than the technology itself, but it does have some merits compared to a regular heatsink/fan cooler.

What makes the Sandia Cooler so special is the fact that the cooling fins themselves are actually moving and this is said to remove the "thermal bottleneck" of current CPU coolers. This is done by placing a brushless DC motor in the centre of the heatsink, a spot that's usually where the motor of the fan is located.



The cooler has a stationary base plate and there's a 0.001-inch (0.0254mm) gap between the base plat and the rotating fins. Now we can see this becoming a huge precision manufacturing issue, as a gap that small is going to be hard to produce. However, this design is meant to alleviate what is claimed to be a layer of "dead air" that "clings to the cooling fins".

So far the cooler has only been created in a proof-of-concept prototype, but it's said to offer several times the cooling performance of a regular CPU cooler. The top part of the heatsink is said to rotate at a speed of "a few thousand rpm" but no specifics were given. The fin structure has been designed to be aerodynamic which in turn is said to make it extremely quiet during operation. On top of that, final production coolers are said to be up to 10 times smaller than current "state-of-the-art" CPU coolers, whatever that refers to.



Apparently the design also prevents the cooler from being "fouled" by dust, i.e. it's not meant to collect dust, unlike your average CPU cooler which tends to need a good clean every few months. It's also meant to be more energy efficient than current air coolers, although considering fan coolers are using similar kinds of DC motors, we don't quite get this point. The technology is currently being offered for licensing and it seems like we'll have to wait and see if there are any takers or not. It sounds a little bit too good to be true, but we'll wait with interest to see where this goes.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories
https://share.sandia.gov/news/resour...leases/cooler/

[fishcracker]

a heatsink spinning?

[164meatshop]

mo work kaha ni? unsaon pag spin sa heatsink kung naka tapot siya sa proc?

[siopao1984]

mo work kaha ni? unsaon pag spin sa heatsink kung naka tapot siya sa proc?

here's the answer to ur question as stated on the original post:

What makes the Sandia Cooler so special is the fact that the cooling fins themselves are actually moving and this is said to remove the "thermal bottleneck" of current CPU coolers. This is done by placing a brushless DC motor in the centre of the heatsink, a spot that's usually where the motor of the fan is located.

The cooler has a stationary base plate and there's a 0.001-inch (0.0254mm) gap between the base plat and the rotating fins. Now we can see this becoming a huge precision manufacturing issue, as a gap that small is going to be hard to produce. However, this design is meant to alleviate what is claimed to be a layer of "dead air" that "clings to the cooling fins".

[siopao1984]

libog nuon ko kung asa ni cya na category sa coolers: passive or active?

[spookey]

libog nuon ko kung asa ni cya na category sa coolers: passive or active?

i think active. ang passive man gud is defined as no moving parts.

[freelancetech]

I think based on my own understanding, this is the new future of CPU Cooling than using tradition cpu coolers. It has multi fans spinning and the rotation and distance of each spins well to dissipate heat faster.

[AMD_infinium05]

the idea is not far from our cooler nowadays... =/

basic ideas are still on this design.

[tsunade]

i have 8 years experience as CAD Operator which involve in mechanical parts design.

question:
unsaon ni nila pag mount nga impeller type raba ni,, kung adto diretso sa board ang mounting ani dili kaha ni mo wobble nya ma daot na hinoon ang board.? (kabalo raba ta nga taas nag rpm ang motor ana + metal/aluminum/copper ang HS).

[bytebandit02]

naa nsad nya lain CPU socket type na ma develop para ani.. hehehe..