Sandia's Laptop Heatpipes Closer To Market

mckennabluedot.com writes "Laptops aren't truly portable until you can stand to sit with one on your lap for more than 30 minutes. Sandia National Labs has developed small copper 'wicks' to transport methanol--and waste heat--from one area of a computer to another, where it can be dispersed more efficiently, comfortably and compactly than with heat sinks. The technology is being licensed to an undisclosed startup." So this stuff (mentioned here previously) might soon make it to a lap near you.

You can keep them on your lap...

[Bugaboo]

If you don't always buy the latest desktop replacement from Dell or whoever. My Toshiba Satellite Pro 4330, while getting a little long in the tooth nowadays (playing DivX movies and whatnot; I bought it in early 2001) doesn't break the 'quite warm' barrier and is comfortable for several hours of continued use, even when doing CPU-heavy things.

So remember, not everyone's trying to shove a desktop into a laptop and burning your legs off because of it.

Re:Finally

[Skater]

Google turned this up:

This Laptop's Too Hot to Handle [wired.com].

Among other links. I didn't see confirmation of the story though...

--RJ

Re:Finally

[iggymanz]

The story is here [news.com.au]

Though I don't know why anyone would put a laptop that close to their crotch. I kept mine close to my knees and to the left so the exhaust port (on my former company's T20) dumped heat far from me. No Rocky Mountain Oysters served on my train, thanks.

Let's call it LinGnux - Happy Birthday Richard, and thanks for the compiler & utilities that freed us.

Actually....

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

It appears that we can't trust society with information. I'm tired of everyone citing the infamous hot coffee case as the shining example of a frivolous lawsuit.

In the case that you're "citing" (I use quotes because you obviously don't know any of the facts.) the coffee was served at 180 F. This is quite a bit hotter than one expects to receive coffee at. For a fun experiment, try brewing some coffee and taking the temperature of it. Your experiment won't yield coffee at this temperature. Second of all, the McDonalds outlet had received over 700 complaints about their coffee being too hot. Other McDonalds have not and do not receive this many complaints about their coffee. It was partially because of these complaints that McDonalds was found negligent - they had plenty of information that the coffee was too hot but chose to ignore it because it was considered better for business to keep the coffee hot at all times so fewer fresh pots would have to be made. Furthermore, the woman in question (79 years old when the incident occured - your typical "victim" looking to get rich quick, right? Oh wait, she'd never filed a lawsuit before in her life.) received third degree burns on her groin, thighs, and buttocks. These burns required skin grafts and an extended stay in the hospital. The woman racked up medicals bill as a result of this. The award was also reduced from the original 2.6 million dollar settlement to 480,000 dollars.

Understanding law isn't quite as easy as just reading some headlines Mohammed.

apple's already done it...

[esoteric0]

the lcd imac (and i think the Tibook aslo) already uses heat pipes. sandia is way behind.

If you're wondering who needs this

[arvindn]

Doctor, doctor, my laptop's burnt my penis! [silicon.com]

Re:Computers shouldn't heat up.

[evilviper]

My suggestion, as far as heat is concerned, is that laptops can be built utilizing processors that use little energy and stay cool. Yes, these are much slower than your Pentium CXXVCVXIIIXCIX

Actually, there is nothing stopping low power processors from being just as fast, if not faster, than the hi-heat x86 processors. The only problem is that the price goes up. No more 2GHz processor for $50. The current line of Alphas are good examples.

That's the great thing about using open source software. You aren't even tied to a processor.

There certainly are alternative-processor notebooks, the current problem is that they are all about $5,000. Personally, I'm not willing to pay more than about $1,000.

Re:Ignorant question?

[NoData]

This might be an ignorant question, but what happenes if you tilt it.

Nothing, I think. These tubes will be less than the thickness of a human hair (according the article), so flow will be much more governed by capillary action and pressure gradients produced by heat differences.

Re:Flamability and toxicity

[NOLAChief]

Without digging out my thermo book (so I could be wrong), I'd say that methanol had the most ideal heat removal properties for this application. Also, this scheme uses wicks smaller than the diameter of human hair. The volume is very very small so the amount of methanol (should it leak, and I guarantee you it's a sealed system.) that could affect you is microscopic. Also, my girlfriend (who's a chemist) tells me that the physiological effects you describe require large quantities of methanol and/or repeated exposure. So, long story short, no worries!

Re:Why waste the heat?

[karlm]

Energy must be thrown away in any system consuming energy at steady state. See second law of thermodynamics.

If you put a heat engine on the CPU, you reduce energy transfer versus a heatsink/heatpipe. You coul recover a small percentage of the power, but it's really not worth it.

Re:Finally

[pnot]

I didn't see confirmation of the story though...

Just in case anyone's tempted to write it off as an urban myth, here [thelancet.com] is a link to the original report in The Lancet [thelancet.com], a very well-respected UK medical journal. (Free reg. reqd.)

Ouch.