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The Hunt for Cool October

Wednesday Oct 03, 2007

I'm not entirely sure what magnetically activated microbladder pumps have to do with magnetohydrodynamics except that both use magnets and both can be efficient, quiet and cool. It's an interesting technology for Sun to hold a patent on and probably far more efficient at moving heat from the chip than Peltier devices which only move heat out of your device with 5-6% efficiency and turn the other 94-95% of the energy into more waste heat! If they weren't so god-awful noisy, we'd probably be better off cooling our CPUs with hilsch vortex tubes.

The magnetic micropump sounds like a good idea until the time when we can recruit Maxwell's demon to haunt and cool our PCs.

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Posted at 03:54PM Oct 03, 2007 by bnitz in Environment
Tags: ecology efficiency

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I made the switch from a Hilsch cooler to Peltier, not only due to the noise, but the extreme volume of air needed. It used to sound like a Jet taking off, every time we'd need cooling , and then the 40hp compressor in the other side of the building fired up, and made more noise for the folks out there too.

We still needed the Hilsch devices when we needed to go subzero, but the Peltier worked pretty well down to -5 deg C or so. In hindsight, LN2 probably would have been the ultimate solution, but being this was in a Tempest room, the last thing we needed was to run into an oxygen deficiency problem. It was bad enough thermally, we had a 20 ton AC unit, just to keep the environment stable enough for our metrology gear to behave.