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anvilmark writes
"ABCNews has an article about a new carbon based thermal conducting foam. Very pricey to produce but has 4-5 times the efficiency of copper at 1/5th the weight of aluminum. ORNL technical documentation available here and here. Sounds like the perfect heat sink shim to me."
The Salvation of AMD (Score:2, Insightful)
MIT developed army suit (Score:3, Interesting)
. Both Klett and Conway have started doing research for the government to adapt the foam for use in "personal cooling devices" for military personnel.
I wonder if they will try to intigrate this into the Nanotech suit that is being developed by MIT? or is this before that
Cookware! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cookware! (Score:2)
Really though, this foam is expensive. Even using the foam as a conductive pad between the heatsink and CPU would be extremely expensive. Although it would help prevent cracking the chips.
Besides, there is a lot more than just conductivity to think about in designing pots and pans. If the pan conducts the heat too effeciently the food will burn where the pan and heat source come in contact, and not cook entirely the rest of the way through. This is why some people still prefer cast iron to aluminum any day. Aluminum pans almost always burn the food unless they're constantly stired.
That means (Score:2)
Shim? (Score:2, Insightful)
A shim refers to a piece of metal that is sandwiched between the heatsink and the proc to prevent crushing the proc core.
Not sure why the hell you'd use this stuff for a shim. As documented here [systemlogic.net] and here [tech-planet.net], shims are generally useless and can cause more damage to processors because of heat/electrical distribution. Thus, shims are generally used to insure that shipping of the core by an over-zealous heatsink install will not occur. There are problems, however, being that if the shim is not exactly perfect, it will be either useless will create a gap between the heatsink and the proc, causing fryage [tomshardware.com].
Thus, most shims are made of light, nonconducting, cheap, oxidized aluminum. I could see abolutely no reason to make a shim out of this stuff.
Unless you meant to talk about the cap on the Pentium 4 procs. In which case, the purpose of the cap is just to spread heat around, and it serves its purpose fine. Intel isn't gonna make their procs a hundred bucks more expensive to help overclockers, whom they don't support anyway.
Re:Shim? (Score:2)
I was thinking the fan could be the heat sink. so you have a heatsink that moves the air away from the chip. It would be lighter, which means it would take less enrgy to spin the blades, and the foam would be quiter.
Re:Shim? (Score:1)
Great heat pipe material (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great heat pipe material (Score:1)
Re:Great heat pipe material (Score:2)
Weird but true.
More info here [cheresources.com] and here [lanl.gov].
Research and development (Score:5, Insightful)
Stories like this have always annoyed me. You always hear about the possible development of an item that is four or five (or however many years) away from being put into commercial application but after that you never hear about it. Or if it is used commerically you never hear about where it has been put into use. I work in the scientific field and I almost never hear about an exciting development after it's initial announcement.
The one exception to this is pixie dust that has allowed for the phenomeonal growth of hard drives. Oh well.
Re:Research and development (Score:1)
Re:Research and development (Score:1)
Yeah! (Score:2)
BlackGriffen
Re:Research and development (Score:1)
Re:Research and development (Score:3, Insightful)
(think of basic research as a bunch of blind men trying to hit a bullseye... The breakthrough is hitting the board. Once people know where the board is, someone else is likely to actually hit the bullseye -- so you hear about the person who first hits the board, and the person who hits the bullseye, but it's rare that the connection between the two events make it through the "15 seconds of fame" filter of media editing.
I hope... (Score:3, Funny)
Goofy comparisons (Score:1, Insightful)
has 4-5 times the efficiency of copper at 1/5th the weight of aluminum
Why don't they throw in "5th as flexible as leather". Or "100 times less soapy than soap"
Re:Goofy comparisons (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Goofy comparisons (Score:2)
The electrical implimentations are limitless!!
Re:Goofy comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
Where did you find this "fact", the encyclopedia retardica?
Alumina, i.e. sapphires et al, have high thermal conductivity, and yet are almost total insulators. QED.
Please, please, try to check your facts. We all make mistakes, but I have seen so many totally wrong posts in this article that it is depressing me.
Re:Goofy comparisons (Score:1)
Alumina, i.e. sapphires et al, have high thermal conductivity, and yet are almost total insulators.
Hey, cool - shiny transparent heatsinks. And when you get engaged, you can mount it on a ring.
Re:Goofy comparisons (Score:1)
The examples you give are completely useless without a standard to measure against.
-Jeff
Re:Goofy comparisons (Score:1)
Hello? It is well known that copper is excellent at conducting heat, but is relatively heavy.
Aluminum is nice and light, but not as good a conductor of heat.
So here we have something that conducts heat better than copper, and is lighter than aluminum. Makes sense to me....
Uhhhhhhhhhh (Score:1)
Re:Uhhhhhhhhhh (Score:2)
Except that ESD foam is electrically conductive, not (very) thermally conductive. Actually, ESD foam isn't really even all that electrically conductive.
Re:Uhhhhhhhhhh (Score:2)
I can't believe how many TOTALLY IGNORANT posts there are in this article.
(not you JesseL, the parent of the thread)
Re:Uhhhhhhhhhh (Score:1)
Re:Uhhhhhhhhhh (Score:2)
You got the code, rip it right out sonny boy.
Mm. (Score:1, Interesting)
Second, processors, etc.
Third, the most important - heating systems. What would this do in terms of cheapening the heating of houses and such? Or being used in a process to remove heat from a home? I'm no hvac person, but would something like this do wonders for those sort of things?
Re:Mm. (Score:1)
Hmm (Score:2, Funny)
Heatsink shroud. (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like it'd do a wonder for preventing condensation, and helping at the same time for Pelter use..
sissy panzies and there water only setup's.
How strong is it? (Score:1)
It seems like this is so new, they really don't know what to do with it.
That and you have to heat the carbon up to 3000 degrees to make it.
portables? (Score:1, Interesting)
While they are getting some really nice results on a weight vs. heat conduction, AL or CU heat sinks are still better when weight doesn't matter - like in your desktop computer.
A much better application for this stuff would be in portable computers. I can't think of any manufacturer that wouldn't like to cut 40grams from the top end laptops.
Disclaimer? (Score:1)
Oh come on, we had these when I was a kid.. (Score:3, Funny)
"Themoconductive carbon foam"? Puh-leaze. We had this shit when I was a kid. Magic Snakes -- You put em on the sidewalk and light them on fire. Just like the one that nearly wiped out South Park last 4th of July.
We were swimming in the stuff!
Re:Oh come on, when I was a kid.. (Score:1)
Re:Oh come on, we had these when I was a kid.. (Score:2)
Dumb question (Score:1)
Re:Dumb question (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:3000 degrees? I thought they said 1100? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Too late! (Score:2)
Might be good for rocket engines (Score:2)
Apples and Oranges (Score:1)
Isn't that like saying "4-5 times faster than the SR-71 at 1/5th the weight of a Buick Regala"? Can't we keep our denominators straight here?
Re:Apples and Oranges (Score:1)
Copper is a better conductor of heat than aluminium. 'nuff said.
Re:Apples and Oranges (Score:2)
The article states the foam is 4-5 times better than copper, and 3 1/2 times better than aluminum at conducting heat.
Yet another worthless piece of reporting. I think I'll wait until science news [sciencenews.org] covers this story.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet! [spamwolf.com]
Re:Apples and Oranges - best properties compared. (Score:1)
Copper is the best material commonly used for heat transfer. Aluminum is often substituted because it is lighter (and cheaper). They (not me) are comparing this new material to the best qualities of each material.
Come on, pay attention here.
Sounds like the... (Score:1)
Well... you put the heat sink shim here.
An athletic suit (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:An athletic suit (Score:2)
Re:An athletic suit (Score:1)
Re:An athletic suit (Score:2)
Sumo Suits (Score:1)
Heatsink shim? (Score:1)
This sounds like a better heatink material to me. Especially for the difficult=to-extrude shapes that may be required for the next generation of efficiency advances.
Nice. (Score:2, Funny)
One problem..... (Score:3, Interesting)
This may not matter for applictions like a processor, but cooling other objects with more of a 3-d surface may be a problem.
I am utterly amazed.... (Score:5, Informative)
Come on - this will not be "keeping your fridge colder" or "cooling your drinks". It will just make whatever it's attached to move to the ambient temperature faster. Wrap it around your fridge and you will have sour cream in your milk, etc. Or else the coldest kitchen around.
Either it's a brain dead friday, or the collective IQ of Slashdot is lower than I assumed over the last few years.
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps we should charter a report on slashdot groupthink. if i were in college i'd do it.
Alternately, i accept the idea that it is indeed brainded friday.
[Disclaimer - Due to the extraction of a wisdom tooth today and the subsequent mind-numbing hydrocodone, i do not claim responsibility for the content or readability of my above post. It makes sense as i type it. thats all that matters. =) ]
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:2)
You know, i've tried to give up on slashdot many times before, but its so easy to be baited back into a debate here. Being me on slashdot is like being a masochistic atheist who regularly attends a baptist church. I don't have anything against linux or freebsd, really... they have their uses.. but its their fan clubs i have a problem with
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:2)
IMHO, it's much better to mod UP intelligent comments than mod DOWN the endless stream of idiotic drivel that goes on here. It's easier to seperate the wheat from the chaff than the chaff from the wheat.
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:2)
Then again, you could simply disregard this post completely. I am an *elitist snob* by nature.
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
My biggest problem with the average American is complacency and apathy. In this day and age(I'm only 20, btw) people are fucking ecstatic about spending their last dime on status symbols they can't afford. It's consumerism at it's worst. That is why I am such a snob. I'm 20; I own 2 cars outright. I work very hard, but I'm not a workaholic. I have a good job, and I'm surrounded by low income white trash(excuse the expression) who can't get a better job because they don't care enough to excersize their minds as much as their wallets.
Research studies have shown that it is never too late to increase your brains capacity for knowledge or learn new skills. They would all drown in their own self created pity-pools if they weren't so apathetic about their lives.
As far as Mensa goes, I took the online pretest and got 29 out of 30 in 16 minutes. After reading about Mensa, they came off even more elitist than I yet had less to back it up. That, and they seemed a little droll. The last time I took my IQ test, I scored in the top
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:2)
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:3, Informative)
For somebody lambasting posters for not having a good grasp of heat transfer, you sure didn't spend much time thinking about it.
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:2, Informative)
it might make the fridge's heat exchanger slightly more efficient, but that just means the compressor won't need to run quite so long to cool the fridge, which in turn means the kitchen will get less hot, since the heat given of by a fridge comes mostly from the motor. the heat being moved from the inside came from the outside in the first place.
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:2)
We're not all engineers, you know. Some of us are English Majors.
Speaking of which, you've got a nasty sentence fragment problem there...
Double braindead, it seems (Score:2, Interesting)
A high-efficiency heat conductor is one that acts quickly. In other words, when a fast moving atom/molecule hits it, the conductor responds more quickly in absorbing the thermal energy and transmitting it to the ambient environment. A 100% efficient conductor would transmit this energy so quickly that all fast moving atoms would come to a virtual standstill inside the container--in other words, absolute zero.
Practically speaking this never happens. Still, wrapping a really fast conductor around a soft drink will cool it off. But you still wouldn't want to do that because you couldn't pick up the glass--the outer surface is going to be hot.
Re:Double braindead, it seems (Score:3, Informative)
Conduction through a heat conductor can be represented with the thermal equivalent of Ohm's law. Warmth of a soft drink above room temperature is equivalent to a charged capacitor, where you can consider the room to be ground.
In your drink experiment, a drink warmer than room temperature will equilibrate to room temperature eventually. The speed with which it will equilibrate with a time constant
tau = RC
where R is the thermal resistance, C the heat capacity of the soft drink.
Lower R (better thermal conductivity) means the time is faster. However, when all is said and done, the drink and the room are all the same temperature, and that temperature does NOT depend on the thermal conductivity. It depends on the relative heat capacities. Given that the room is much bigger than the drink, its heat capacity is much larger, so the change in room temperature is negligible. (The amount of heat in a warm drink is the amount of heat in an infinitesimally warmer room.)
The only thing that could get signficantly hotter is a cold drink in a warm room.
I think you need to study a bit harder, Mr. PhysicsGenius.
Re:I am utterly amazed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Jeez, what a jerk. There are always common misconceptions, even among geeks. We're all here to learn and gain more knowledge via interesting and thought provoking conversation on Slashdot.
So don't come off like an ass hole. I'm sure someone has set you straight in something embarrassingly stupid that you should've known.
hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Heat sink shim? (Score:2)
Great for Cooling UltraDense Clusters & Handhe (Score:3, Interesting)
The handheld and laptop market is another area that could really use this to keep the cpu and graphics processor cool.
This sounds like it takes highly thermally conductive polymers like CoolPoly [coolpolymers.com] to another level.
.
Good for space (Score:2, Interesting)
Not all that hot... (Score:2)
If you read Poco Graphite's tech specs [pocofoam.com] on the material, you'll see that the thermal conductivity is between 100-150 W/m-K . Depending on alloy, copper runs 3 times better at between 350-400 W/m-K. Good aluminum gets close to 200 W/m-K.
You aren't going to see this stuff used in a radiator unless weight is a primary constraint. Looks to me like
Re:Not all that hot... (Score:4, Informative)
I was talking about copper alloys. At room temperature, Both copper 110 and 101 alloys have a thermal conductivity of 391 W/m-k. Phosphorous laced copper alloys will drop you down to around 380. The only reason I happen to have these numbers is I'm currently working on a heat sink.
The news article that got this thread going had so many inaccuracies that I'm prone to think that a marketeer at Poco got somebody at ABC News all excited with hype. Given the foam's poor thermal conductivity, I seriously doubt the national security agency is using it as a heat sink unless, possibly, it's on a satellite. But if that were the case, Poco would have been nda'd and the story wouldn't have made light of day. The story smells of marketeer-speak.
You're right about the density uneveness. There are several elemental foams available that have very uniform density. You can get metal silver foams for applications where surface area is very important. John Carnack (of doom fame) has been playing around with silver foams as a catalyst for hydrogen peroxide to drive his rocket [armadilloaerospace.com].
However, as a heatsink, foams don't fare well because heat transfer is partially a function, not of surface area as you assert, but of the cross-sectional area perpendicular to heat flow. Foams have lots of surface area which is nice for catalysts but have lousy cross-sectional areas which is what is needed to transfer heat from one edge of the foam to the other. Once the heat is spread out over a heatsink's mass, THEN the heatsink's surface area comes into play. Foams suffer as heatsinks because they can't move heat well from the primary hot spot to their extremeties.
Having said all that, there's some experimental work going on with carbon heat sinks that are configured in standard heatsink geometries. Anandtech's Cebit report shows a few pictures of some carbon heatsinks. Carbon is attractive, because as an element, it does show promise. As a working material, it's difficult. If carbon nanotubes ever get out of the lab, there'll be a huge change - they've got great thermal conductivity - somewhere in the thousands of watts.
Foam (Score:1)
Carbon this, carbon that (Score:2, Funny)
think outside the beige box... (Score:3, Interesting)
make make WRX even happier
useful in supersonic aircraft... conduct the heat away from leading edges much faster than normal.
c'mon, join in... what other real-world apps could this be useful for. if the price can come down, and the production can come up... I can think of a lot more places this stuff would make sense.
The real question is... (Score:2)
I worked for the manufacturer - Poco Graphite (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would you want a shim? Make a heatsink instead (Score:2)
I thought, that maybe I was missing something in my vocabulary (english isn't my maternal language), but neither Merriam-Webster [webster.com] nor my Oxford dictionary was able to find more than one meaning of the word:
If you were to create a heat spreader [intel.com] (the chip on the left) as in the old socket 370 celerons and new Pentium III and Pentium IV (the large block of metal protecting the chip die), it would probably be a lot more useful (depending on it's strength of course).
If it is stong enough, it would probably be quite useful as a heatsink as well, although it would probably cost you a bundle at the moment.
But why use it as a shim? What next? Only use money for wiping your butt (don't try this trick with coins. Don't ask!)?
Grafoil: graphite heat conductors (Score:3, Interesting)
Heat dissipation capacity? (Score:2)
anyone have any thoughts (Score:1)
Re:anyone have any thoughts (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Jumpsuit (Score:1)
Re:Underwear. (Score:1)
Re:shim..sink - what's the difference? (Score:1)
Re:shim..sink - what's the difference? (Score:2, Informative)
The idea is to increase the amount contact surface area between the CPU and the heatsink.
Re:shim..sink - what's the difference? (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. A shim is generally not thermally conductive (and better damn well not be electrically conductive ...), since it doesn't matter whether it is or not.
Again, wrong. The idea is not to increase the amount of contact surface between the CPU and the heatsink, as this would be impossible to do, unless you made the CPU itself larger -- heat only radiates off of a CPU from the little rectangular core in the middle; the ceramic surrounding the contact point has little to no thermal conductivity. Instead, the idea is to give the heatsink a larger area to which to apply pressure. This means it's going to be more difficult (though not impossible) to chip the CPU core if you're using a shim than if you're not. Shims only became popular with the Athlon Thunderbird chips that were trivially easy to break with a sloppy heatsink install. Since those shims were made out of copper (bad! that's electrically conductive, which means you could very easily short out your CPU), many of the more clueless overclockers instantly thought "copper == cool", and thus assumed that shims were another way to lower their CPU temps by a couple more degrees. They were wrong.
Re:shim..sink - what's the difference? (Score:1)
Re:Make a beer keg blanket to keep your kegs cool. (Score:1)
House insulation is just that.. insulation. this foam is heat conducting. which isn't so good at keeping the summers outside from attacking you or your mini server room.
Re:Make a beer keg blanket to keep your kegs cool. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Make a beer keg blanket to keep your kegs cool. (Score:2)
Using good thermal conductors for keeping things cool only works when they are hotter than ambient. This stuff will not help keep your fridge or your keg cool. Also, using this foam for cooling things like engines will only work as long as it can transfer heat to the air more efficiently than what they already have, otherwise the foam will just get heat-saturated and your engine will still be too hot.
It's a thermal conductor, not an insulator. (Score:1)
And I don't know where you got the polarity idea... it's not a Peltier.