High temperatures in electronics have always been a problem for their performance and lifespan. Historically, this problem has been dealt with in two ways:
- By means of cooling with the surrounding air by accelerating it (by mean of fans).
- And by adding some features like channels, heatsinks, thermal paste (and some other elements that have been developed in the past years in order to achieve the maximum energy dissipation from the components of every motherboard).
But excessive cooling effort has three immediate consequences:
- It wastes energy
- It increases costs
- It adds the maintenance variable to the equation
White Paper Highlights
Historically, for electronics, fans and heatsinks were good enough, but in the present times, more computation density is needed. The chips are required to operate at their maximum, and one of the known problems is that temperature affects their performance. Those chips can withstand high temperatures, but would not it be great to have them operating in a very comfortable environment?
This is one of the missions Submer chose to achieve since the Company started the Immersion Cooling venture.
The Convenction Principle Applied to Submer’s Technology
Using SmartCoolant for thermal management can be a change in mindset for the electronics industry. There are a lot of different solutions in the electronics industry for cooling down microchips and other components, but some of them are pushed beyond the limits and the market is demanding a stronger solution. The SmartCoolant gives the opportunity to improve this scenario by avoiding the use of accelerated cooling flow – no fans are needed – since the base heat transfer coefficient of the fluid is way higher than air.
About the author
MSc in Aerospace Engineering and Specialist’s Degree in Fluid Mechanics, Jaime Pita is the Project Lead for the MicroPod at Submer, and he is also responsible for the Thermodynamics team.
“[…] excessive cooling effort wastes energy, increases costs and adds the maintenance variable to the equation.”
