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Heat-Conducting Carbon Foam 224

Posted by michael from the stay-puf dept.
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."
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Heat-Conducting Carbon Foam More

Heat-Conducting Carbon Foam

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  • This is definitely plus for all the AMD buffs out there. Also good for the company. Provided this becomes a little cheaper, this and the Hammer could really give a boost to AMD's market share.

  • MIT developed army suit (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SteakandcheeseUm ( 191173 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:00PM (#3210308) Homepage
    the end of the article states

    . 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)

    by tchdab1 ( 164848 )
    I want a set of pots and pans in this stuff!
    • New From NERF the frisby you can cook in!
      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.
  • they could make the fan out of this stuff, and it would be both a heat sink and fan.

    • Shim? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by $carab ( 464226 )
      Not sure you know what the hell a shim is, dude.
      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.
      • I wasn't thinking about the shim when I posted about the fan.
        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.
        • The fan itself doesn't conduct any heat. Nor should it. If anything, this will help make heatsinks more conductive, and thus you may be able to get rid of the fan alltogether. Which would be great, less power consumed, and one less moving part in the computer. You can't just make a heat sink really really big and then get rid of the fan, that won't work. The heatsink has to be able to conduct that heat from the proc to the outside world.

  • Great heat pipe material (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vought ( 160908 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:04PM (#3210323)
    You could make a nicely-shaped heat pipe with this stuff, tranferring heat from say, a processor to the outside of the case easily. I'm sure hardware and environmental engineers will have a ball with this stuff if it can be produced relatively inexpensively.

  • Research and development (Score:5, Insightful)

    by reflexreaction ( 526215 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:04PM (#3210325) Homepage
    Klett admits that it is highly unlikely the foam will break out of the lab and into widely available commercial applications anytime soon.
    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.
    • All to true about this kind of thing. I'm not sure how many of you remember that show Beyond 2000 but they did a story about a guy in Japan I think who invented a paint that would heat up when you applied current to it. He put some on a styrofoam tray and used it to cook an egg.
    • That's why it's called "research". The vast majority of research projects never pan out, but you can't stop doing 'em. Otherwise progress would come to a halt.

    • I remember when I was in sixth grade, what 8 years ago, and we were visiting the local state university. One of the professors had a lecture about research he was doing in to sonic refrigeration, and even showed us some units that could build up a pretty good sized thermal gradient. Being the environmentally conscious little git I was, wanting a freon free frige, I asked him how far from a commercial product they were. He said 3-4 years.....

      BlackGriffen
    • My guess is that the researcher will realize that he put the wrong end of the thermometer in the experiement and that the foam was actually insulating. He will then quietly fade into the background hoping no-one noticed the gafaw.
    • In many cases, the great scientific breakthrough will point people into a general direction that produces something better than the original breakthrough...

      (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)

    by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:04PM (#3210326) Homepage Journal
    ...noone makes a batch of cofee cups from this material by mistake...
    -mi

  • Goofy comparisons (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Comapring glaciers to Singapore, and now we have a material that:

    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"
    • "1/10th less irritating than a Jon Katz article."
    • Don't forget that a materials heat conductivity is always exactly proportional to its electrical conductivity. Maybe we can use this new material for low density semiconductors!!

      The electrical implimentations are limitless!!

      • Re:Goofy comparisons (Score:4, Informative)

        by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:42PM (#3210532) Journal
        Uh, wrong, try again.

        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.

        • 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.

    • Ummm... Last time I checked you *can* measure the actual thermal conductivity and weight of copper (or any other material) or look it up in a chart. These comparisons that they give in the article are very useful information to give people a general idea of what properties the material has.

      The examples you give are completely useless without a standard to measure against.

      -Jeff

    • 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....
  • This looks very similar to the conductive foam that you usually store CMOS ICs in to prevent them from static discharge...

    • Except that ESD foam is electrically conductive, not (very) thermally conductive. Actually, ESD foam isn't really even all that electrically conductive.

      • Yep, and also, I have a multimeter and a piece of ESD foam right here. (God I'm a geek), and it measures 30,000-100,000 ohms depending on how close you put the probes to each other.

        I can't believe how many TOTALLY IGNORANT posts there are in this article.

        (not you JesseL, the parent of the thread)
    • "If IE's Windows integration is a monopoly, then I'm all for the removal of Konqueror from KDE."

      You got the code, rip it right out sonny boy.

  • Mm. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First, we'll never hear of this again likely.

    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?
    • Where would you put it? The evaporators we have now are already pretty efficient in exchanging heat.

  • Hmm (Score:2, Funny)

    by sulli ( 195030 )
    What if they made Peeps [slashdot.org] out of this stuff?

  • Heatsink shroud. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Night0wl ( 251522 )
    Screw heatsink shroud. This sounds like a great mobo backing over the pin array on the back. And as a plug filler inbetween sockets.

    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.
  • One thing they don't mention is how strong the material is. It might be brittle, or revert back to normal insulating carbon after a long while.
    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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.
  • Do you think it will come with a warning label that says "Caution! Contents Extremely Hot!" It should hold to at least the same standards as fast food restaurants!

  • Oh come on, we had these when I was a kid.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:18PM (#3210405) Homepage


    "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! ;)

    • in 1920.. or was it '21 I came up with the idea for slashdot. Of course computers and the internet hadn't been invented yet and by the time they were I was too senile to remember I'd had the idea in the first place so I turned my efforts to thermally conductive foam. Nurse.. nurse!?
  • Why doesn't it burn? I know diamonds don't unless you subject them to really high temps, but this sounds a lot more like the allotrope(sp?) of carbon I'm a little more used to, which burns nicely...

    • Re:Dumb question (Score:3, Informative)

      by NanoProf ( 245372 )
      If you heat it up hot enough in the presence of oxygen, it will burn. So will a diamond, for that matter. The 3000 degree heat treatment that they use during synthesis must be done in an inert atmosphere. Coal burns more easily than diamonds, I'd guess, but both are carbon with fairly similar heats of combustion. Local carbon bonding comes in two main forms, sp2 (triangular) and sp3 (tetrahedral) bonding; the binding energies of the two are quite close and both will happily burn in the presence of oxygen, at high temperatures.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • 1100 is mentioned near the beginning. A later paragraph states:
          Another reason is the high production cost. As part of the final manufacturing process, the foam must be heated to temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Celsius or more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. "That's a tremendous amount of energy," says Conway. And as such, the ovens are necessarily very small and the yield of material is often very modest.
  • The Germans made their Zepplins out of this stuff sixty years ago.
  • Rocket engines need high thermal conductivity, to lower the inner temperature of the rocket engine, and light weight. If this material is as good as they say then provided they can sort out any potential mechanical issues this could well be an excellent material to use- graphite works very well anyway, and this sounds like it might work better.
  • Very pricey to produce but has 4-5 times the efficiency of copper at 1/5th the weight of aluminum.

    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?

  • poster was drunk...
    Well... you put the heat sink shim here.

  • An athletic suit (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GreenPhreak ( 60944 )
    It would be cool if you could make an athletic suit out of this material for athletes to wear to prevent being overheated. It would block the sun's rays (reducing heat), but allow excess thermal energy to slough off a runner into his/her surroundings. Maybe the foam would be too rigid to make into a wearable apparatus, but it sounds like a cool idea. Either way, it beats sweating in order to cool down.

    • if its too good, you'ld "freeze" to death.
    • Ah, but you would need a good conductor of heat to move the heat from the suit to the air (I.E. Run very quickly.) And the suit would simply gather heat from the sun ("You can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black")

    • Will not work. Even if you workout naked -- uncovered -- and in the darkness (hush!) -- no sun rays, you still get overheated (assuming "room" temperature) and sweat. Sweat cools you down by evaporating, but this material will prevent the evaporation. Unless, of course, it is also porous...
    • or you could make one of those Sumo Suits out of it and be able to 'rassel for hours without overheating. Think of the possibilities! And the children!
  • "This sounds like the perfect heatsink shim to me."

    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)

    by zapfie ( 560589 )
    I can see many potential uses for this, including shaving foam and marshmallows that make your cocoa cold.

  • One problem..... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Veramocor ( 262800 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:40PM (#3210521)
    If you read the literature fully you'll find that the thermal conductivity is directionally orienented. So if you go 90 degrees in the other direction of the fibers it basically has a thermalconductivity of 1/5 aluminum. (see table 1 of the second ducument).

    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)

    by dr_db ( 202135 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:47PM (#3210558)
    That so many posters confuse a heat conductor with a heat pump.

    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)

      by AnalogBoy ( 51094 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @08:06PM (#3210638) Journal
      The collective IQ has dropped significantly. About now, the 2nd generation of slashdotters are making their exodus to other news sites - or - worse - the real world. By leaving the collective and making the ratio of clue decreases, leaving the bottom-rung stallmanite slashdrones to pick up the slack, so to speak. in addition the average age is now lower.

      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. =) ]

      • leaving the bottom-rung stallmanite slashdrones
        Yeah, but you're still here. I blame the hydrocodone. :)
        • I have a lot of free time. I won't remember typing any of this tomorrow.

          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 :)

    • uhm... a fridge is a heat pump that takes heat from the inside and moves it outside. so wrapping this around your fridge (back of the fridge in particular) will give you a really _hot_ kitchen, and a really really cold fridge (given no hardware failure). The body of the fridge would do a decent job of insulating the outside from the inside, the conductor will just help the heat pump.

      For somebody lambasting posters for not having a good grasp of heat transfer, you sure didn't spend much time thinking about it.
      • wrapping this around your fridge (back of the fridge in particular) will give you a really _hot_ kitchen

        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.
    • That so many posters confuse a heat conductor with a heat pump.

      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...
    • You are wrong and they are right...but for the wrong reasons.

      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.

      • Sorry, try again.

        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.

    • My god! The TRAVESTY! We all must be utterly retarded if we don't know the difference between a heat pump and a heat conductor!

      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)

    by nEoN nOoDlE ( 27594 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:48PM (#3210565)
    carbon based thermal conducting foam, huh? I wonder if I can encase someone in this stuff and hang em up on the wall in my desert palace...
  • Heat sink shims are for balancing the pressure of the heat sink on the CPU die so that the heat is transferred evenly and that the core doesn't get damaged by unequal pressure. It does nothing for cooling. You could use concrete if you wanted to, it is just that nobody would buy that because it isn't a colorful shade of copper.

  • Great for Cooling UltraDense Clusters & Handhe (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LuxuryYacht ( 229372 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @07:52PM (#3210577) Homepage
    This is a great material for cooling supercomputers and ultra-dense servers that would otherwise require more elaborate elaborate liquid cooling systems.

    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)

    by in seine ( 563296 )
    Just the thing to keep things cool in orbit. This is important because the effeciency of solar panels goes down as they get hot. The only way for the heat to get out is ratiation and your opponent is the sun.
  • Not sure where the 4-5 times copper efficiency comes from.

    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 /. and ABC news got hyped into running non-news.
  • I think this is a really good way to go. Copper is efficent and cheap, but foam will become easier to produce as our technology grows.
  • Have you noticed how it seems like nearly every recent significant advance in materials sciences and engineering is based on carbon? Sheesh, pretty soon they'll be announcing carbon based life forms....

  • think outside the beige box... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @09:01PM (#3210886) Journal
    add-on heat conductors for improving air-ventilation on disc brakes...
    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.
  • ... can they install Linux on it?
  • I worked for POCO Graphite in Decatur, Texas up until 6 months ago. POCO is the only licensed manufacturer of graphite foam (POCOFoam is their name for it). This stuff isn't just good for a heat sink shim - IT CAN EASILY REPLACE YOUR ENTIRE HEATSINK AND FAN! But- heatsinks are only the beginning. POCO has made prototype car radiators out of this stuff that are 6 inches by 8 inches by 1 inch - AND THEY WORK EXTREMELY WELL! To get an idea of just how well POCOFoam transfers heat, check out this video clip http://www.pocofoam.com/images/foam.mov. You will be highly impressed - I guarantee!
  • A shim [mikhailtech.com] (as I understand it) will do about as much for your heat transfer as jumping up and down will cause an earthquake. More or less.

    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:
    a thin often tapered piece of material (as wood, metal, or stone) used to fill in space between things (as for support, leveling, or adjustment of fit)
    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)

    by Dahan ( 130247 ) <khym@azeotrope.org> on Friday March 22, 2002 @11:35PM (#3211390)
    While not the same thing, carbon has been used as a heatsink interface material for years. My DEC Alpha came with a Grafoil [graftech.com] pad to use between the processor and the heatsink, in lieu of heat sink paste. It's apparently spongy graphite made into a flexible pad.
  • Sure, this stuff is more efficient than copper for conducting heat, meaning it has a low thermal resistance. However, to continue the electrical analogy, I wonder what would be the "thermal current" it could support? That is, how many watts could this material really dissipate? For all we know from the article, maybe if you try to put in more than a few watts per square inch, the stuff melts or catches fire.

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