Ultra Efficient Chip Cooling Passes Boeing Tests 682
joelgrimes writes "A company called Cool Chips plc is showing off a cooling device that claims unbelievable efficiencies using what they call 'quantum mechanical electron tunneling'. A choice quote from their press release: "A panel of Cool Chips one inch square will provide enough cooling for a refrigerator; a panel about two inches square will have the capacity to provide the air conditioning for a living room". They also mention using them to cool microprocessors. I used to think this company was nuts, but Boeing is making me think twice. Oh, and by the way, they work in reverse to make electricity from heat. Should I sell my baseball cards and buy their stock now, or can an army of slashdotters poke holes in their claims?" Fascinating stuff. Makes peltier coolers look pretty old school. In the press release they claim up to 80% efficiency, compared to 5-8% for peltier coolers and 50% for conventional refrigeration. I will say the cool chips corporate logo is baffling, though.
Chip cooling? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Chip cooling? (Score:4, Funny)
Sure you wanna do that? We've got a bone to pick
with you for sending over that Van Damme guy.
And don't get me started on the sprouts...
Oh, no... (Score:5, Funny)
RMN
~~~
Mirror (Score:2, Informative)
Local over heating (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Local over heating (Score:3, Informative)
No, it's sound engineering.
Who would buy a P4 if in its worst possible stage, data and enviroment vareables it run at 1G?
What are you talking about? This is true right now, but the P4 is still selling well. This is because if you have proper cooling and are running the cpu in spec, you never see the clock halving occur. The observation is that while the maximum power is X, you rarely if ever see power usage above Y in real workloads. Without this feature, you would still have to design for power X, since it -might- happen. This way, you can design for power Y.
When you start having clock gating it will only cool down the processor on average executions (pending loops etc.).And thus has no point as the chip would still work at exactly thesame speed as the worst possible scenario with none of the gating being turned on.
Once again, what are you talking about? Clock-gating is a power saving technique. You turn off the parts of the chip you aren't using, thus saving switching power on those parts. It does -not- reduce maximum power, except to the degree to which it is impossible to use all parts of the chip at once. The purpose is to reduce -average- or -typical- power, not to increase the max frequency by reducing the worst case. So it does indeed have a point.
The next set of high power precessors will have finer temperature detection and will retard only parts of the chip that are going mad.
Now this, however, would have no point. If a part of your machine is "going mad", that means it is being used heavily, and thus it a safe bet that the code you are running depends on that unit, and thus retarding that part of the chip would decrease your performance, quite possibly exactly to the degree to which you reduce the frequency. At that point, you might as well slow down the entire chip, since you've already screwed yourself by slowing down the critical path.
Eather that or async logic will kick in.
The only thing async logic will do for this is reduce the need for the margin built in to the frequencies of clocked chips. Hey, I'm all for that, but the fact remains that the part of your chip that is hot and thus running slower is almost certainly the critical path for performance, and thus you'll still see performance degrade. Getting rid of that margin is a noble goal, but there are ways to do it without having to resort to the complexity of an asynchronous design.
Slashdotted already? (Score:4, Informative)
Refers to COLCF and BOREF
Cool Chips plc
Gibraltar
14 May 2002
Cool Chips plc (COLCF) said that its Cool Chips(tm), wafer-thin discs designed to produce cooling or refrigeration more efficiently than any competing technology, use quantum mechanical electron tunneling as the primary cooling mechanism. The Cool Chip is one of the first transformative technologies to emerge from the nanotechnology revolution.
The Cool Chip technology could eventually replace nearly every existing form of cooling, air conditioning, and thermal management. Prototype devices are being shown publicly for the first time at the Nanotech Planet Conference in San Jose, California, that begins today. The company has not previously disclosed the full scientific basis for its technology.
Because of the inherent advantages in cooling across a gap using electron tunneling, Cool Chips are projected to attain efficiencies much higher than those previously available in cooling systems, and they are much less than 10% of the size and weight of compressors. Cool Chips are modular, and can be packaged in arrays to cool virtually any size heat load.
The company expects its Cool Chip(tm) technology, which has been in development since 1994, to replace all thermoelectrics and compressors for cooling, in applications ranging from electronics and infrared sensors, to computer components, refrigeration, and air conditioning. Cool Chips are on target to have an overwhelming cost advantage.
Cool Chips will enable many new and improved consumer products. They will enable laptops to run cooler, for example, and make possible in-car soda and grocery coolers. A panel of Cool Chips one inch square will provide enough cooling for a refrigerator; a panel about two inches square will have the capacity to provide the air conditioning for a living room; and a panel about five inches square will supply enough cooling power to cool an entire house.
Most existing cooling systems use compressors and environment-damaging fluids and are 40-50% efficient. Smaller thermoelectric cooling devices, despite more than $1 billion spent on research, are only 8% efficient. Cool Chips are projected to operate at 70-80% of the maximum theoretical efficiency (Carnot) for cooling.
Cool Chips prototypes are small electronic devices similar in appearance to computer chips. When an electric current is applied, one side of the chip will become cold and the other side hot, as electrons "tunnel" across a 1-to-10 nanometre gap separating the two sides, carrying heat with them. Innate device advantages include high efficiency, solid-state design, silent operation, environmentally friendly materials and operation, and compact size for easy integration.
"We have demonstrated the capability to make multiple prototypes that show a tunneling current in excess of 10 amps, using a wafer area approximately 9 square cm in area," said Isaiah Cox, Cool Chips' president. "This is, by far, the largest tunneling current that has ever been reported across a gap, and we expect Cool Chips to make the first use of this quantum tunneling effect in a primary commercial application."
The tunneling current can be harnessed to provide cooling of very high density. The theoretical heat flux for flat electrodes suspended 50 Angstroms from each other is on the order of 5000 watts per square centimetre. Cool Chips(tm) will be more than adequate for cooling the next generation of microprocessors, which will produce upwards of 100 watts of heat per square centimetre.
Cool Chips are currently in development, and it is expected to take over a year to complete prototypes which demonstrate high output and efficiency. Current prototypes are being used to increase the quantum tunneling, and cooling has not been directly measured to date. Once the tunneling output has been increased to a certain level, our scientists intend to begin increasing cooling output.
An IV curve and other information is now available on the Cool Chips website at http://www.coolchips.gi.
The Cool Chips technology is protected by an extensive patent portfolio. This coverage extends to include a broad array of techniques related to this unique thermal management system, which offers solutions for nearly any thermal management application.
Cool Chips plc, based in Gibraltar, is a majority-owned subsidiary of Borealis Exploration Limited (BOREF) and has 7,281,785 shares outstanding. Borealis' business is reinventing the core technologies used by basic industries, including electric motors, steelmaking, electrical power generation, and cooling and thermal management.
For further information contact:
Chris Bourne
Director of Public Relations
Cool Chips plc
+44 20 8571 5216
pr@coolchips.gi
Forward Looking Statement at http://www.coolchips.gi/fwdlook.shtml
Re:Slashdotted already? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, it is the reason you can't just stick an air conditioner in the middle of the room or leave the fridge door open and expect your house to get cooler. You have to have a heat exchanger outside to dump the heat removed from the cold side and the 20% waste heat that they are quoting.
Maybe they are talking about making the inside of the laptop cool while having a big funky heatsink on the outside which you could fry an egg on...
Re:cooling laptops (Score:2, Funny)
Big, funky heatsink needed? (Score:2)
I wondered about this too. So, how about that quantum-cooled fridge? I didn't imagine that radiator being hot enough to fry an egg. I imagined it hot enough to start a fire, degrade the drywall it was backed up against, melt lead, melt steel.
But maybe if each individual level is microscopic, instead of a single wafer with all the elements on it, your quantum fridge or quantum air conditioner is has a pair of panels with dozens of smaller quantum cooling wafers scattered, at intervals, so the heat load wasn't too high at any particlar point.
A big, old technology heat sink would be necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, a big, old technology heat sink would be necessary to draw away the heat just a short distance from the cooling area. The heat is moved only a short distance, even if you believe the article. At that short distance, you would have the same problem of the heat you started with, plus that introduced by the inefficiency of the device, and you've paid someone some money.
It surprises me to read the comments above. Most readers don't seem to have much understanding of the basic issues of science.
This is a hoax. Maybe the press release is the result of someone hacking the Boeing web site. Maybe someone paid a Boeing employee to post it. Maybe some evauluator at Boeing was genuinely fooled.
Note the date of the press release: SEAL BEACH, Nov. 30, 2001. If this were real, we'd be seeing it on TV news stories.
File this story with super-efficient data compression, a story that appeared last year on Slashdot.
Re:A big, old technology heat sink would be necess (Score:3, Insightful)
If your argument is correct, then the thousands of Peltier-cooled devices that already exist, in fact, do not. They're all a hoax.
The whole point of heat exchange in a processor context is to move the heat far enough away so that it does not affect the processor. Who cares if your heat sink, which is attached to the 'hot' side of the cooler, is at 150 Celsius? The metal certainly doesn't. As long as the *chip* stays cool, there ain't a problem.
Granted, it's not gonna make laptops run cooler, but it just might let them run faster.
--nick
Re:Slashdotted already? (Score:2)
IP will move to the least amount of resistance...
Gibraltar (OT) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotted already? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a British colony in the middle of Europe: the last residue of the British Empire. Spain and GB are in negotiations about making it a shared territory.
See http://www.gibraltar.gi/history/ for the locals point of view.
Re:Slashdotted already? (Score:2)
Energy generation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Energy generation (Score:3, Insightful)
Well,
Your typical automobile loses about ONE THIRD of the energy in gasoline to the exhaust pipe in the form of heat. If you could turn this heat energy into electrical energy, then you would have automotive panacea. 100mpg would be easily possible with gas/electric hybrid cars.
The fact that this is so revolutionary leads me to believe that it is a huge fib. This is just vaporware - nothing to see here. Move along... If it is not a fib, then you should buy stock and retire on this technology.
Re:Energy generation (Score:3, Informative)
There's a thing called the Second law of thermodynamics, which in common words states that Entropy _will_ increase.
As a result there will NEVER be a device possible that will generate energy by colling it's environment (without overall energy loss).
One can however produce energy from the system's environment, but the efficiency there is bound by the temperatures involved. What one can do quite easily is use a thermal pump (doesnt matter of which kind) to cool the ground soil for example and use that to heat the house, which at first glance could seem like a perfect heating solution, but first of all the ground looses a lot more energy that one can take out of it, moreover the efficiency with practical temperatures is quite low and the pipes and such in the ground simply costs more than it's worth.
So what I'm trying to point out here is that the problem with heat pumps these days is not them being unable to reach the optimal efficiency (because they're quite close really), but instead the optimal efficiency itself is already bound by theory. No heat pump discovery ever will change that.
But yes, there's "free" energy out there within our grasps, it's just that it's production costs more than it's worth.
Wind, solar and other practical sources are far more probably solutions after 40 years that oil runs out (or 80ish when the uranium does the same).
Here's the key: (Score:3, Informative)
If you read the article closely, you will see that they claim the device is 70-80% of Carnot efficiency. 'Average' people would never realize this, they see the 70-80% number, and see that it's much better than the 50% you expect out of a vapor-compression cycle.
That is remarkable, but not outside of the realm of possibility. There must be irreversibilities in the system if it is not operating at 100% carnot efficiency.
Big companies make mistakes occasionally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Big companies like to throw their money around just to make sure they don't miss the 'next big thing'. Often they make terrible mistakes...
Take Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgian speech recognition software company, which Microsoft invested a ton ($40m?) of money in. The Chairman of MSFT Europe was on the board.
Yet when L&H went belly-up in 2000, it turned out 100s of millions of revenues were fraudulent. MSFT was no better at picking a company with solid speech recognition technology that the rest of us.
So, don't assume that - just 'cause Boeing *appears* to be supporting CoolChips - that the company is a good investment.
Re:Big companies make mistakes occasionally! (Score:2, Funny)
L&H : Sometimes the technology is there ! (Score:3, Insightful)
These guys made great products... But that just wasn't enough for them... So they got into these fraudulent revenues schemes with daughter-companies in distant countries...
Just my 2 cents.
Re:L&H : Sometimes the technology is there ! (Score:2)
Hmmm. That sounds familiar. Almost Enronesque.
Re:Big companies make mistakes occasionally! (Score:2, Informative)
Without data from even a not-so-independent reviewer like Boeing (not so independent since they seem to have some financial interests in the company), I'm far from thinking this is close to reality.
Re:Big companies make mistakes occasionally! (Score:2)
Solar energy too (Score:5, Informative)
From http://www.borealis.com/technology/patents.shtml [borealis.com]:
Patent 5981866(StampPE)
PROCESS FOR STAMPABLE PHOTOELECTRIC GENERATOR
Abstract
Manufacture of a photoelectric converter by a photolithographic or stamping process prior to coating with a photoelectrically emissive material is described. This gives an economic and simple means of mass-producing photoelectric converter cells, and in one aspect is analogous to that used for pressing optical discs.
Slashdotted (Score:4, Funny)
If what they claim is true, why has their server melted?
from their web site (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.coolchips.com/technology/overview.sh
What is Cooling with Electrons?
"Hot" and "cold" are words we use to describe the presence (or absence) of heat. Heat is best described as energy contained within something else. So a cup of hot coffee has more energy than that same cup an hour later, after much of the heat has dissipated.
The energy which makes up "heat" is the kinetic energy of the atoms which carry the heat. So if the atoms in the cup of coffee are very active, the coffee is "hot". If the atoms become less active, the coffee is "cold". And if the atoms get cold enough so that the atoms are no longer in a fluid form, the coffee freezes into a solid.
While atoms in a solid themselves tend to be pretty immobile, the sub-atomic particles within them are always moving. At any temperature above absolute zero, electrons are constantly in motion, spinning around the atom, but also (especially in metals) swapping places with the electrons of surrounding atoms.
Of course, some electrons have high energy, while some electrons have low energy. The low energy electrons are cold, while the high energy electrons are hot.
Cooling with electrons involves encouraging the high energy electrons to escape, bringing in low energy electrons to replace them. It is analogous to removing the loudest people from a party: the party gets quieter.
What makes Cool Chips special?
There are other technologies which use electron migration to reduce heat. These fall under the rubric of "thermoelectrics". These technologies all use special materials and geometries to move the hottest electrons to one side, keeping the coldest electrons at the other.
The biggest problem with thermoelectrics is that while electrons are used to carry heat in one direction, the material itself returns most of that heat through conduction!
Cool Chips are special because the electrons move across a gap -- and that gap, since it is not a solid, is an excellent insulator. Once heat is trapped on one side, it cannot easily return.
How do we get the electrons to move across the gap?
The difficulty in getting lots of electrons to flow across a gap is that electrons do not naturally leave their atoms to go into space. Electrons do jump around a lot (it is called tunneling), but those jumps are pretty short, from one to ten nanometers, or just a few billionths of a meter long.
Researchers at Cool Chips plc have figured out how to get two materials very close to each other so that electrons can tunnel from one material to the next, carrying their heat with them. With the addition of a voltage bias, which encourages the electrons to move in a given direction, the heat is then transferred from one side to the other. And because there is a gap between the two materials, the heat cannot simply flow back!
Why hasn't this been done before?
Thermotunneling has not been done before because nobody imagined that it was possible to get large surfaces areas close to each other without making occasional contact. Cool Chips' scientists not only imagined a way to do it, but we have accomplished this goal and are currently refining our patented process.
Once these devices become commercially available, they will not only revolutionize the industries of refrigeration and cooling, but all of those industries that depend on them.
Re:from their web site (Score:2, Funny)
HH
Isn't this Maxwell's Daemon? (Score:2)
Isn't this exactly the same as Maxwell's Demon [uci.edu], which violates the second law of thermodynamics?
Re:Isn't this Maxwell's Daemon? (Score:2)
The cooling chip uses externally supplied electricity to run. This powers the "flashlight", meaning that no violation of the Second Law need occur. The refridgerator in my kitchen does the same thing: It moved high-energy atoms from the coiled pipe inside to the grid of pipes in the back, by using electricity to move the atoms.
Ouch! (Score:4, Funny)
Baz
Hmm..Look at this (Score:5, Informative)
Cooling not yet measured? So, the device works in theory, but there might be an unanticipated roadblock ahead which significantly delays or hinders their ability to produce devices that actually cool something. :/
Justin
*HINT* *HINT* Laws of Thermodynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*HINT* *HINT* Laws of Thermodynamics (Score:2)
I think they were trying to imply that (in market speak) when they said efficencies of up to 80%, compared to a fridge of 50%, or peltier of 10%. The latter two numbers are about right for real world. If they can achive 80% efficiancies and the chip doesn't cost too much (the guts of a fridge are a hundred or so) this could easially replace all the fridges and air conditioners out there at a net savings of a large amount of electrisity.
Sure you have to get rid of the heat, but it doesn't appear that they were claiming you didn't have to do that, rather they seem to be cliaming that you have to get rid of less heat then other technologies.
Cold spot/hot spot (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about *any* dispositive of this kind. It moves heat from here (you room, the refrigerator box, the surface of the CPU...) to there (usually the air, or a free water mass). Now, two extreme examples:
Your air conditioner: it colds mainly due to convection and conduction (the air circulates and goes near a cold tube system). Now, no matter how effectively those chips steal heat from air, how much air you can pass over an square inch on a time unit, given the fact it has to be in countach with the refrigerator unit time enough to transfer that heat to it -the chip can be marvellous, still air is not a good heat conductor?
Your CPU: Your CPU is nowadays a heat place. Now you put one of those chips which steals heat from your CPU's one square inch surface very effectively... just to put that heat on the external chip one square inch surface! You still have *exactly* the same problem than rigth now: how do I remove that heat from the colding system? It is still one square inch, it is still within my PC box, it is still very hot (and remember: once all the chip is at the same temperature than the "hot" side, it won't refrigerate no more).
The problem with *all* refrigerating systems is the same: move the heat from where I don't want it *to a place where it can be "pumped off" as fast as it is producing*.
Re:Cold spot/hot spot (Score:5, Informative)
If the heatsink on the hot side of the coolchip isn't radiating as much heat as the CPU is producing then (assuming the coolchips heat pumping properties work) the hot side of the coolchip will keep getting hotter until the radiation of the heatsink matches the heat output by the CPU. You argument would work if the coolchip was just an excellent conductor of heat, but it's a heat pump - it can shift heat from a side that is cool to a side that is hotter than the side the heat came from.
This is what heatsinks are for, a 1 inch cube heatsink can have a huge surface area (which air is then blown through), and there's no reason to stick to one cubic inch, the heatsync can be much larger than the coolchip provided it can conduct the heat sufficently to all it's tiny fins. If two coolchips can actually do the heat pumping work of an air conditioner, then transferring that into the actual air should be no trickier than with conventional aircon units.
Quantum Tunnel in reverse? (Score:2, Interesting)
And for that matter how you do Quantum Tunneling that results in a -ve gradent less than the energy used to tunnel the electrons in the first place. i.e. More heat is produced tunneling than tunneling looses.
Post got a bit mangled, read this instead (Score:2)
So here goes again.
It could work in theory I think, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The electrons could 'borrow' some energy on the cold side, which allows them to tunnel through the gap. They then return the borrowed energy on the hot side. Provided the amount of 'borrowed' energy * the time they borrow it for is less than h (Planck's constant) then this is allowed by physics.
A potential gradient across the gap reduces the chance that electrons can tunnel back in the other direction. You have to provide power to create this potential gradient, which is where the 80% efficient figure comes from.
The company's breakthrough is apparently making this gap with enough area that electrons can move en masse through it, thus providing a large cooling effect.
Re:The company's breakthrough is (Score:2)
"The main problem i see is in the transit of the electrons/energy across several atoms etc..."
Already been done - that's how a transistor works. With a transistor though, the gap is on a much smaller scale (cross section), so any cooling effects will be far outweighed by other inefficiencies in the system.
Nice idea but it has a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
its no good cooling something only to dump the waste heat a few millimeters away just so it can
leak back into the device/fridge/whatever. You need something to transport that heat away
whether than be a fan or a liquid transport system.
So I reckon these devices (if they work) will be great for largish appliances and PCs but not much
use in your average laptop where there is no room for a fan and just glueing the hot part of the
chip to the casing is asking for trouble (and burnt users).
Re:Nice idea but it has a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice idea but it has a problem (Score:4, Funny)
need something to transport that heat away whether than be a fan or a liquid transport system.
You attach another cool chip to the back, obviously.
Re:Nice idea but it has a problem (Score:2)
quite right, and FYI peltiers explained (Score:3, Informative)
The idea is you wind up with the same amount of heat, just rearranged. Peltiers have a bimetallic junction, which acts as a diode of sorts. A diode will cool on one side, and re-emit the heat at the other. Small effect, but get enough surface area and you have something. The battery op coolers have these things. How they actually work is any dissimilar junction electron needs to overcome a barrier, and the energy it uses normally comes from the voltage applied. Instead, peltiers use the raw thermal energy at the junction gap(the - side) to go to the + side, picking up energy. When they recombine at + side, energy is released as heat.
Big drawback is most junctions don't take kindly to being heated on either side, so you need to sink them quick.
This seems to be way more efficient, either not allowing an electron to 'get lucky' and jump over an impurity, or has to continually pick up more thermal energy on the way over, or has a ridiculously efficient manufacture process at nanoscale, and can afford to get just the right material thickness(1-10nM)
my 2c adjusted for inflation...
This reeks of stock manipulation... (Score:5, Interesting)
I quote from their Investor Relations page:
"Cool Chips plc common shares were cleared for trading in the United States by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) on 24 April 2002. Quotes are available from www.pinksheets.com under the symbol COLCF. The Cool Chips Technology work is managed out of Europe and we are a virtual company based in the European Union. Your Company is a member of the Borealis Family of Companies, and is incorporated in Gibraltar. Gibraltar law is essentially English law and we are governed by that. We have elected to use Gibraltar GAAP as our reporting standards, as these are the standards of our domicile.
In addition to the Investor Information available for our parent company, Borealis Exploration Limited, links to corporate information specific to Cool Chips plc are located at http://www.coolchips.gi/investor/corpinfo.shtml
Stock quotes can be found at:
Pink Sheets: BOREF COLCF Bloomberg: BOREF COLCF "
Does that sound like pandering to you? It sure does to me, and my wallet is firmly tucked away.
Just remember... their own statement is that they are a virtual company run out of a tax haven. Caveat emptor. Don't throw your SlashDollars away.
Re:This reeks of stock manipulation... (Score:2)
a big [but likely dumb] name, Boeing.
Boeing is dumb???Boeing??? You mean the same Boeing that is one of the worlds leading aerospace companies and handles billions of dollars in top-secret cutting edge Military applications? You mean the same Boeing that helped NASA build the space shuttle?
A company such as Boeing is litterally stacked to the top with PHD's and engineers which most liely make your knowledge look like Mickey Mouse. Even if they did make a mistake on this company, it doesn't mean they are "big and dumb".
Re:This reeks of stock manipulation... (Score:5, Funny)
There may be a bunch of smart people working at Boeing, but that doesn't necessarily make Boeing, as a corporate entity, smart.
Re:This reeks of stock manipulation... (Score:3, Funny)
1) Look at your bank account.
2) Make an airplane.
3) Look at your bank account again. The difference is what it cost to make the airplane.
Re:This reeks of stock manipulation... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This reeks of stock manipulation... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, being offshore doesn't necessarily mean anything. A lot of very "respectable" U.S. companies are heading off shore to get the tax break.
Re:This reeks of stock manipulation... (Score:2)
No, he's not one of the techies building it so I can't milk him for details but I'd trust him that this isn't snake oil.
"Your Company" Mad Libs (Score:2)
Is it just me, or does this look like a template document where someone missed one of the 'search and replace' terms? E.g. Perhaps Borealis provides this boilerplate text to all of the companies they try this with.
Clerical errors are by no means an indication of anything more sinister. But clerical errors in the stock trading information that a company provides don't really make me feel especially warm and fuzzy.
-Mark
Sounds reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading their technology explanation, the idea certainly seems reasonable enough! The trick being of course in the manufacturing of the two very close but seperated layers.
If I understood their physics-for-dummies explanation correctly, the principle relies on two metals separated by a very thin gap; a potential difference across the plates encourages tunneling of electrons across the gap, carrying heat with them.
IANAP, but I'm sure someone here is: doesn't vibration at the atomic scale in some crystalline medium also act like a particle? Can these guys also tunnel across gaps, or is their weird quantum nature restricted to the single medium they're expressed in? If they could tunnel, I would have thought that as the heat differential across the plates increased, their tunneling would also increase, acting as a break on the process and bringing about an equilibrium situation (temperature differential vs. potential differential.) Or is the mechanism for equilibrium simply black-body radiation across the gap, or similar?
What sort of temperature differentials are possible through a device like this? Is it only limited by mechanical constraints?
Hope these thoughts aren't entirely moronic.
good intuition (Score:2, Informative)
QED
Re:Sounds reasonable (Score:4, Insightful)
(I was a physicist)
Vibrations if atoms in a solid indeed behave like particles. They're called phononss. Them aswell as the electrons are basically responsible of the heat conduction in solids. Only electrons and other electric particles can tunnel. Phonons are very much like particles but they do need the medium (i.e. the solid) to travel in, where as electrons are not bound by medium.
What I see happening with this system of theirs is a lot of excess heat that has to be taken away once it's on the other side.
People cooling their pcs should remember that their problems are actually quite practical. They have few hundred watts coming out their chasis and that has to dealt with, no matter the actual cooling device next to the cpu. The problem _is_ the CPU producing shit loads.
There are uses for highpower cooling although most physicists these days disregard the problem and use liquid nitrogen or even liquid helium. It simply kills the heat and releases just some gas that isn't harmfull. One can then produce it somewhere else where exess heat is no longer a problem.
"Baffling" Logo (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"Baffling" Logo (Score:5, Funny)
You'll find out next time you'll go for a swim at the beach... no more mr nice dolphin!
Communist conspiracy (Score:2)
Maybe it's a hammerhead and a sickle.
Cheers,
IT
Re:"Baffling" Logo (Score:2)
That's a whale that lives in the arctic.
note the lack of dorsal fin.
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't get much from very little... (Score:2, Insightful)
They, like many companies, have a lot of theory, a lot of calculations, and a lot of patents. Chances are they are hoping to sell it all to someone who has the resources to really try it out. Along with their other 'innovations' it appears that they are an IP company.
-Adam
Real Efficiency? (Score:2)
What constitutes "work done" in this case.
Real physicists only please.
Questions.... (Score:4, Insightful)
How cheap (or expensive) this chips are?
How long they endure?
If they costs 1000s of dolars and work for a year I would stick to the cooler fan and my good old refrigerator.
Could I ask a dumb question? (Score:2)
This is amazing... (Score:2)
Moving heat with electrons? (Score:2)
Limerick (Score:3, Funny)
Some said of them "they're insane",
The chips got no colder,
the investors got a tolder,
your stocks worthless, oh what a shame.
Same problem as Peltier: Condensation (Score:4, Interesting)
You could try reducing the humidity of the area so there is less water to condense, but if you look at a modern data center, the humidity is intentionally kept at around 40-50%, to reduce static electricity.
Low humidity is bad for electronics, condensing water is bad. I suppose you could seal the cooling element on with something that is air tight, but now you're getting into more complicated and expensive solutions.
Guardedly Optimistic.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem with the standard Bismuth Telluride junction (like in your electric cooler chest, or your CPU cooler) is that the material doing the work has to have two contradictory properties:
The problem is that electrical conduction involve the movement of electrons, which can carry heat with them, so most electrical conductors also conduct heat well. But if you conduct heat, you get leakage from the hot side to the cold side of the device.
And if you make the device less electrically conductive, you increase the heat generated in the device by the electric current, degrading efficiency. The biggest problem with Peltier junction coolers is that for every watt of heat you move, you MAKE ten watts of waste heat.
Now, perhaps with proper microstructuring, you could make a system in which electrons under a potential difference tunnel across a gap, carrying heat without providing a thermally conductive path back to the cold side, and perhaps you could get high cooling efficiencies out of such a device. Granted, you still have to pull the heat off the hot side of the device, but if you could (for example) have the cold side at 20C next to your CPU, and the hot side at 120C exposed to an air stream, you will move more heat into the air stream than you would from the 50C surface of a CPU that was not actively cooled.
So, what they are saying is at least plausable (unlike the "I can move video over three miles of dental floss" crap some folks have fallen for), however the best cons in the world have started from a plausible start.
I won't whip out MY checkbook until I see a real device, in a real setting, moving real amounts of heat, and can poke, prod, and probe it to my heart (and more importantly, my BRAINS) content.
Sweet deal (Score:2)
Why this is bullsh*t... (Score:4, Informative)
It's difficult to attack these claims, simply because they haven't _explained_ the physics or materials or construction beyond trendy buzzwords and, by the way, they seem not to have actually _built_ any devices. This is typical of bunco artists hyping seemingly wonderful new technology. See all the "zero point energy" hucksters, for example.
However, a little common-sense physics is enough to demolish this scam. I'd like to hear their answers to the following questions and objections. But, I bet they won't do it.
There is no such thing as a near-perfect (or even really good) temperature insulating solid material - the only pretty good temperature insulation is... a vacuum. Any decent vacuum over a nano-scale gap is going to close the gap, real quick (especially if there is the strong electroforce attraction between negative and positive semiconductors helping); that's Strike One.
Such a Peltier-like device has to work by pumping electrons into the cold side and removing them from the hot side. But injecting electrons into the cold side _excites_ the existing n-doped semiconductor's electron-states, and it's only the rapid migration of those excited electrons away from that layer that removes heat (and the device has to pull away unbound electrons marginally faster than they are injected to provide cooling). It's impossible to extract more electrons than are added without entirely stripping the substrate eventually, and long before that happened you'd see _reverse_ tunneling of electrons into the very depleted cold substrate; here's Strike Two.
Then there's the claimed energy transfer. At the rate of 500w/cm**2, the hot substrate is going to start generating _photons_ (which have no charge, so they're not going to be bashful about moving _back_ across the "insulating" gap) and they will carry... heat; ergo, Strike Three.
Sure, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" [A.C. Clarke], and great technological leaps are desireable. But the only "magic" these people have in mind is moving significant amounts of money from scientifically naive, greedy, and gullible investors into their own pockets. But, it were ever thus: caveat emptor.
Re:Why this is bullsh*t... (Score:3, Interesting)
Caveat: I really am Not a Physicist, and am talking with little clue. But I don't think it is as bleak a picture as you describe.
For starters, I thought these weren't necessarily semiconductor based. If I understand the principle correctly, you'd want both sides of the device to behave like metals. 'Hot' electrons would be being replaced by relatively slow-moving electrons from the current source.
Also, if (big 'if') you can do some fancy molecular footwork so that the two layers are held apart by relatively heat-non-conucting struts, then there could still be a fair amount of room to produce a temperature differential before heat conduction back to the cold side caused equilibrium.
Lastly, there's always going to be some radiation-based transfer of heat from the hot side to the cold side, but again that just constrains where the equilibrium point is going to be reached. It's possible that in normal operating range, this effect is quite small.
Bitboys are back? (Score:2)
A new chip that does something so mindblowingly amazing... etc.
Not 70-80% efficiency! (Score:4, Informative)
Just so everyone is aware, in thermodynamics the Carnot engine is not a 100% efficient engine. Actually, depending on a few variables, the carnot engine can be incredibly inefficient.
Stating that the efficiency is 70-80% of the maximum theoretical efficient (Carnot engine) for cooling doesn't mean that much, since it doesn't fit the equation we all think about.
70-80% = Energy Out/Energy In
Instead we get
70-80% = Energy Out/(Energy In * Carnot Efficiency)
Since |Carnot Efficiency| 1, we end up with a artificial increase in the actual efficiency of the engine.
I would personally like to see the results of the actual efficiency, not this skewed statistic.
.....Marvin Mouse.....
(Math, CS, Physics, Psychology Undergrad)
CoolChips can't handle SlashHot (Score:2)
Extraordinary claims (Score:4, Informative)
As experience has shown [slashdot.org] - suckering a major company with X does not mean X is true.
That said, actually, I believe this could work. The "efficiency" claim, however, is somewhat bogus. Quoth their webpage:
to a projected 70-80% of the maximum (Carnot) theoretical efficiency for heat pumps. Conventional refrigerators operate at up to 50% efficiency and current thermoelectric systems (Peltier Effect) operate at 5-8% efficiency.
The Carnot efficiency is not 100%; it is (Th-Tc)/Th x 100%. Th is the temp of "hot" half of the engine cycle and Tc is the cold. Both are in kelvin. So, if your car engine runs at 400K (boiling water) on the compression stroke and 300K (freezing water) on the expansion stroke the maximum efficiency you can theoretically get is 25%.
Now, they seem to be comparing the percentage-of-theoretical efficiency that their device gets with the actual efficiency of other devices. The upshot is that I believe refrigerators also run at about 80-90% of the Carnot efficiency, which is 50% actual efficiency, but I might be making a mistake.
I suppose this maps somehow to a total kinetic energy operator for the individual electrons they are moving (1 minute chemistry - heat is "thermal motion", the degree to which particles are bouncing around. Every "observable" feature of a particle - position, kinetic energy, momentum, and so on - is actually "random", and is related to the "wave function" of the particle, which is a function that tells you the probability of finding the particle at any given position, by an operator, the position operator is the number 1, which is itself a function that maps from a set of algebraic functions to a set of algebraic functions. The math for these operators is hoary as all hell, not analytically soluble, and they can generally only be dealt with pproximately/computationally.)
Clearly - and I'm talking about the second law of thermodynamics, here - they can't actually convert environmental heat into an electrical potential. A heat differential, on the other hand, could very well be done, so they might be usable (in the long run) as a way to generate electricity while venting waste heat from nuclear reactors and the like.
I get it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Either/or (Score:2, Interesting)
So many potential uses... personal cooling systems, body temp regulated of course (thinking of spinning the material into thread and having it woven into a jacket liner while static/kinetic energy or temp gradients powers it).
Re:Either/or (Score:2, Funny)
If it does indeed prove to be "the first great technological breakthrough of the 21st century" then let the record show that the announcemnt of it on the "Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters" site immediately devolved into a discussion of the potato.
Re:Either/or (Score:3, Funny)
Indeed. If I were to cover my body in enough of these, not only would I prevent myself from spontaneous combustion, but I'd also be able to power my Segway, portable potato peeler and 4000 Watt flood light simply by thinking "warm" thoughts.
Re:Either/or (Score:3, Informative)
Hardly a fair statement. This makes it sound like the US is the only place where people do not believe in global warming. The FACT is that a lot of people/scientists/governments around the WORLD don't believe in the significance of so-called global warming.
The only thing as bad as ignorant Americans making generalizations is ignorant non-Americans making generalizations. (read equally ignorant)
Re:Either/or (Score:2, Insightful)
The polar ice caps melting means the sea level rises and we lose land, and not gain any. That is a very big deal.
Now personally, I am a sceptical enviromentalist and it's perfectly possible this is all entirely normal behaviour for our ecosystem, but what we are doing is absolutely just making things worse.
Now I agree that AC is not a waste, it's damn hot in some places and people would die (litteraly) if it wasn't there.
Also, yes the Kyoto agreement didn't make a lot of sense in the US, because it didn't take in to account how many forests the US plants (or other forms of conservation). In this respect, the Kyoto agreement was fundementally flawed.
BUT, all that said, the US (in general) seems to have less of an 'public awareness' of this issue. And it's something that all countries need to tackle.
Even if the melting of the polar caps is entirely natrual, it's surely fair to except we are all only making things worse, and pretending that the issue doesn't exist is not going to make it go away.
Re:Either/or (Score:2)
The goldminers of Western Australia didn't have AC for 150 years. I've been to a place where it can get up to a mind boggling 50 degrees Celcius.
Underground houses/rooms keep the temperatures in living spaces bearable.
India isn't blessed with AC all over the place and yet the hot streets aren't littered with burnt corpses. (just regular corpses and the living dead)
I've not been to the inerior of the US but I guess the temperatures are pretty much the same. AC makes the environment less challenging but isn't life or death.
Indian corpses here! (Score:3, Informative)
How about some right here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/sou
That was in today's news. 450 dead in Indian heat wave.
no problem with the right architecture (Score:3, Informative)
Oh I really hope your post is a deeply ironic humourous one, sessamoid. I notice all your examples are from the USA.
Having travelled to India, Spain, several other hot countries, I've seen a lot of architecture designed to work with the temperatures: narrow alleyways which are always in shade, houses with thick insulating walls and small windows, air ways through the houses to channel slight breezes into cooling air flows. These things work. These things have been working for hundreds if not thousands of years.
I believe you are refering to architecture and town planning dependant on artificial cooling techniques: big, open pavements exposed to the sun, large glass and steel buildings with huge windows, big doors facing into the sun.... Also check out people's life styles. Remember Rudyard Kipling's famous line 'only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun'. If you're in India or the southern Mediterranean, people get off the streets by 11 in the morning. It's just the crazy tourists wandering around out there. Everybody else is working or relaxing out of the sun in the nice cool shaded buildings. If you want to see real genius, check out the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (and I am sure there are many other fine examples).
Please tell me your email was one of those 'wind up the dumb rednecks' style postings...
Re:Either/or (Score:2)
So if we followed your logic Canada does not have to concern itself with pollution?
Re:Either/or (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Either/or (Score:3, Insightful)
If the ice caps recede, so will glaciers, releasing land for use.
Most glaciers are in mountaine area. Not much use from that aea if the glacier is gone. At least not in relation to the same amount of are in a more asy to farm zone.
It is true that most ice is floating
No this is wrong. Would be interesting from where you got that.
The north polar reagion is only floating ice. So your sample with the ice qube in a glass of water is right, besides the fact that we have in this case "sweet water ice" floating in "salt water". If it melts, the levle rises. (
The south polar reagion is a continent. That continent is a bit bigger than Australia or about 1.5 times the size of the United States. (www.everything2.com)
That continent is covered with a ice cap about 2km to 4 km hight.
Oh, nice, everything2.com even covers that also, and they say the highest ice mountaine is 5km
Anyway, if all that ice would melt the sea level would rise about 100 meters. Of course the global warming is not that fast. So a sea level raise over the next 50 years will only be about 10 meters, bye bye New York
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
P.S. if you go for skiing to Austria or Swizerland you can watch the snow line going up the mountaine each year. A winter 0.1 degree warmer than the year before is 2 weeks less winter holidays or 100 meters higher snow line.
actually.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ooooooh. "Global Warming." (Score:2)
It doesn't fucking matter if it is caused by humans or not. The effect seems to be real (if you read real scientific documents on the subject and not political propaganda) and we better try to stave it off any way we can.
Better safe than sorry.
If I'm wrong and we try to reduce CO2 emittion, we might lose some money. Or not, the research into energy efficient technology can potentially create more value through spinoff effects than the shift to these technologies will cost. (I.e. the space race.)
If we just sit on our asses and you're wrong we have a major-world-wide-big-ass-catastrophy on our hands.
I know which course of action seems smarter to me...
Re:ooooooh. "Global Warming." (Score:3, Insightful)
yes... of course it is.
like the guy said:
- if the global-warming people are wrong, we'll still win cause energy will cost less (we'll use less, more will be available - prices will go down - simple economics.)
- regardless of whether global warming is occuring or not, we do have other tangible and conclusive problems due to emissions. Eg someone mentioned acid rain and how buildings in europe that have been standing for hundreds even thousands of years have seen accelerated erosion in the last few decades.
- drought: you really think the solution to droughts is to let the world heat up? again, we could use money we save on energy (through conservation) on those 3rd world drought stricken people you're concerned about.
- further, regarding poor countries. if you're so concerned about poor countries, then why try to buy their emissions credits from them? (and hence pass the burden of energy consumption reform onto those least able to pay for it). oh wait, the US decided to ignore kyoto altogether.
anyway, that the worlds biggest wasters, sorry, consumers of energy pro rata in the world would be dismissive of the need for energy conservation, dismissive of the will of the entire rest of the world... sad, but no surprise.
right of first refusal (Score:4, Informative)
Right of first refusal means that you get a chance to buy something before anyone else does. It is the business equivalent to the concept of having "dibs" on something.
It also does not represent too great a risk on Boeing's part. They aren't obligated to buy this technology. They just have the chance to buy it before anyone else does. While they are certainly paying for this privilege in some manner (maybe the press release is the payment), they aren't jumping in with both feet.
Re:refusal ? (Score:2)
Re:refusal ? (Score:2)
Re:.5 inch gives... (Score:4, Interesting)
To vaporise that gas it drained the heat-energy from the drink and therefore instantly cooled it.
It's probably cheaper than Coolchip too.
Buffalo wings? (Score:2)
Re:Price (Score:2, Interesting)
If it costs them 50c to produce a chip as efficient as a $200 aircon heat pump, then until there is someone else who can produce a heat pump for less than $200 there is no reason to charge less than $180 for the chip.
I suspect this is what has happened with the micromirror chips Texas Instruments invented to replace LCD projectors, for all the waffling on about how cheap these things would be, they've been available for a few years now and a projector will still set you back $5000, regardless of whether you get LCD or micromirror.
Until there is a competeing technology, these chips will not be significantly cheaper.
Re:Price (Score:2)
If it has a smaller foot print and is more efficent than other direct cooling technologies, it will sell.
Trust me, If I could use this to cool a CCD chip down to LN temperatures without the use of a water chiller or LN dewar I would be willing to pay for it.