Sound Waves Keep Your Computer Cool!

Prepare to throw you cooling fans and heat sinks out the window! Scientists say they won't be powerful enough to cool your future computer processors anyway, and liquid cooling techniques will be implied in just a few months or years. However, cooling computer chips with liquids are not as efficient as they might seem, they will keep you computer cool no doubt about it, but this technique requires a greater power input. Thus, instead of using traditional refrigerating methods to lower the temperature of the working fluid, researchers from the U.S. propose the use of sound waves.

The process of cooling the liquid may suffer a 150 percent improvement by using sound waves. High-power applications that use liquid circulation systems to draw out the excess energy have one big problem. As the liquid phase reaches the hot stop, it will start to boil and absorb energy by turning into vapor which will be pumped away. However, during this vaporization process, part of the substance forms tiny gas bubbles right on the surface which needs to be cooled and acts like a thermal insulator shield that prevents an efficient cooling.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated more than five years ago a method of how to break the insulator film, which used high-speed water jets to detach the vapor bubbles, but was proven inefficient due to the high-power consumption and the fact that the device was rather bulky. Recently, Ari Glezer, the scientist that led the experiment back in 2005, proposed a radical new approach. What if the insulator film would be broken with sound waves?

They found that by placing a speaker between the volume of cooling liquid and the heated surface, they could dislodge the tiny bubble, in order to improve the cooling process by as much as 150 percent. During the experiments, the speaker was driven by a signal with frequencies approaching 1 kilohertz and it provided excellent results while only a few millimeters from the heated surface.

As you might expect, sound cooling techniques are not only limited to computer components and they could one day be used to cool high-power components in hybrid vehicles, or micro-scale heat exchangers.