Radiative Thermal Paste

[maxwell_labs]

Shameless plug, but would love you guys to test/evaluate our Wx-130 Radiative Cooled Thermal Paste. We are a small startup that has created a thermal paste enhanced with radiative cooling technology (could go on a very deep dive on how this works if people are interested). We’ve extensively tested it against all the top pastes (pulled from TomsHardware), and found it outperforming all of them. We are just getting off the ground and would love to start getting consumer reviews going. Our website is still getting refined, but there is a decent amount of content in there explaining what we are up to. Happy to answer any questions!

Amazon.com

Link is OK)

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Hi there, welcome.

Always good to have some fresh air in the field!

So, according to your website, the Wx-130 is twice as thermal conductive as MX4, is it?

 

[maxwell_labs]

Hi there, welcome.

Always good to have some fresh air in the field!

So, according to your website, the Wx-130 is twice as thermal conductive as MX4, is it?

Thanks for the warm welcome! Our Wx-140 achieved a thermal conductivity of 15w/mK, and our Wx-130 comes in at 13w/mK. We need to make that correction on the website. The Wx-140 is in R&D because despite having a higher thermal conductivity rating, the Wx-130 seems to be outperforming it, and we are trying to understand why that is. We measure our thermal conductivity with a Trident Thermal Conductivity Instrument (https://ctherm.com/thermal-conductivity-instruments/trident/). Let me know what else I can answer! I hope you give our TIM a try!

 

[EarthDog]

Hey there! Thanks for reaching out! As much as we'd love to test this out formally, we don't have the bandwidth at this time. As soon as we do, I'll ping you for sure.

That said, you're welcome to stick around and hang out! We'd love to hear a lot more about the paste!

 

[maxwell_labs]

Hey there! Thanks for reaching out! As much as we'd love to test this out formally, we don't have the bandwidth at this time. As soon as we do, I'll ping you for sure.

That said, you're welcome to stick around and hang out! We'd love to hear a lot more about the paste!

Thanks for letting us be here to talk about it! The last thing we want to do is come across as self-promoters of spam nobody cares about, but we've tested the hell out of it and see it as a game-changing technology that many people in the PC world would appreciate knowing about. Love to have you test it out when you get the chance! I'm happy to share our internal test results privately, but mostly want to get unfiltered feedback from the community.

Without divulging too much about how the sausage is made, we get the additional radiative cooling effect by carefully tuning/selecting nanoparticles embedded into the paste, which converts heat into IR light. The radiative thermal compound is just step one. Step two is launching our advanced cold plates that have special IR windows incorporated in them to get an even greater effect. Step three incorporates an optical coupling to produce a full-on radiative heatsink, but we are just launching a POC project funded by a private company so won't have much we can share on that for a while.

If people really want to nerd out, search near-field thermal radiation to learn more about the physics of nanoscale radiative heat transport.

 

[RollingThunder]

Shameless plug, but would love you guys to test/evaluate our Wx-130 Radiative Cooled Thermal Paste. We are a small startup that has created a thermal paste enhanced with radiative cooling technology (could go on a very deep dive on how this works if people are interested). We’ve extensively tested it against all the top pastes (pulled from TomsHardware), and found it outperforming all of them. We are just getting off the ground and would love to start getting consumer reviews going. Our website is still getting refined, but there is a decent amount of content in there explaining what we are up to. Happy to answer any questions!

Amazon.com

Is this your product?

Amazon.com

New members posting a link makes a few of us more than a little "nervous." Your Amazon L:ink in your OP has been deleted upon reconciliation. Please understand our side..

 

[maxwell_labs]

Is this your product?

Amazon.com

New members posting a link makes a few of us more than a little "nervous." Your Amazon L:ink in your OP has been deleted upon reconciliation. Please understand our side..

Yup. That's our stuff!

 

[EarthDog]

Ok, so...question........

Nanoparticles.......... someone correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a paste that came out a few/several years back with nanoparticles of some sort that pitted blocks and IHS'? I don't know if that was a per-batch issue or what, but have you seen any pitting in your testing?

Also, the thermal conductivity, what is MX-4/5? What about the metallic products? How does your product compare in your testing to those?

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Ok, so...question........

Nanoparticles.......... someone correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a paste that came out a few/several years back with nanoparticles of some sort that pitted blocks and IHS'? I don't know if that was a per-batch issue or what, but have you seen any pitting in your testing?

Also, the thermal conductivity, what is MX-4/5? What about the metallic products? How does your product compare in your testing to those?

MX4 is 8w/mK. Conductonaut is 70'ish.

The TIM you are talking about is a diamond nanoparticles (IC Diamond IIRC), which scratched IHS, and coolers' base. Very abrasive, but that was due to the nature of the nanoparicles (diamonds).

Edit: Liquid Metal is top notch, but not for most (too risky IMO if not done properly).

 

[maxwell_labs]

We haven't experienced any pitting issues with our stuff. It's not nano-diamonds making the magic happen. We haven't found a polymer-based compound that can beat our stuff, but liquid-metal compounds do perform better...at least for now.

 

[Blaylock]

Another question that is bound to come up on this site is how well it performs and holds up at sub-zero temperatures. There are more than a few of us rodeo clowns that will occationally hit our systems with LN2, Dry Ice, and/or single stage coolers.

 

[maxwell_labs]

Our stuff can hold up to what you sub-zero clowns throw at it. Both the Wx-130 & the Wx-140 (still in R&D), are rated for -230°C.

 

[EarthDog]

radiative cooling technology (could go on a very deep dive on how this works if people are interested).

Do tell!

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Do tell!

Well, had a look at it. Very complex stuff, looks really interesting, but understanding in depth it is undoable without a (very) good level of maths and physics (which I don't have).

 

[maxwell_labs]

Well, had a look at it. Very complex stuff, looks really interesting, but understanding in depth it is undoable without a (very) good level of maths and physics (which I don't have).

This is very accurate. The math and physics get extremely deep, and there is a tiny handful of people who study it, but the numbers are growing as more awareness of the capabilities of metamaterials increases. Our CEO is a brilliant individual who has a gift for breaking the science down in a digestible manner. We could get him on here and spend a couple of hours answering any questions you all have if that would be helpful. Another option is just to keep posting questions, and I'll have him tackle the tough ones.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Yes, seen that. Russians started studying it in the 50's-60's right?

 

[maxwell_labs]

WARNING: Overkill answer, haha...

Radiative Transport of thermal energy has been investigated extensively since the inception of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics back in the late 1800s (i.e. Maxwell, Boltzmann, Planck, etc). Near-Field radiation and radiative cooling have been growing fields of academic interest over the last 20 years. However, the most exciting advancements have occurred much more recently (less than 5 years), demonstrating how the properties of thermal radiation can be engineered through materials science using a new class of materials called metamaterials, or sometimes referred to as metasurfaces. Near-Field radiation has been shown to play an important role in how surface features of a material interact with polymers and nanomaterials to transfer energy across an interface. Radiative cooling specifically has major implications for passive cooling technologies where fans and pumps are either problematic, or too limited to handle the power densities of emerging processor architectures. The laws of physics appear to allow for radiation to be utilized to enhance the capabilities of cooling technologies in ways we could not imagine a decade ago. In fact, thermal design engineers are accustomed to ignoring radiation effects in designing cooling systems because it has historically only accounted for a marginal (<10%) of the total cooling power for most applications. But this is no longer the case - there is a paradigm shift occurring at this very moment to establish radiative thermal transport as a fundamental mechanism to move heat faster than we had imagined possible with convection/conduction. And this fundamentally why Maxwell Labs exists - exclusively developing its core technology around dissipating heat at the speed of light, orders of magnitude faster than any other cooling technology could ever achieve in its wildest dreams.

Here are a few review papers that give some insight to these exciting fields - DM if you need help accessing.


Near-Field Radiation Review: https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.93.025009

Far-Field Radiation / Radiative Cooling Review: https://www.espublisher.com/journals/articledetails/159

 

[maxwell_labs]

Just bringing this thread back up. We would love to hear feedback from anyone that has tested our TIM! Please share your results!

 

[User5566]

I don't want to discourage anyone from testing and I'm open to hearing the results, but let me be the first to call bull*** on the principle. Unless there is some truly novel physics involved radiative emissions at the temperatures we're working at are so small they can be disregarded completely.

For example, everything that has a temperature above absolute zero emits some IR, different materials emmit different amounts at the same temperature, but the absolute physical limit is a so called "ideal blackbody radiation" and there is a formula for it that depend on the area and temperature. So let's take 70C as our temperature (343K) and an area of an imaginary ihs of 4cm square. Plugging our numbers into the blackbody radiation formula we get 785W for a square meter of area or 0.314W for the area of our Ihs. This is a 100% negligible amount of radiation energy.

Now, one can imagine an obvious approach to increase this by increasing the surface area by introducing lots of tiny nanoparticles suspended in a medium transparent to IR. But then once each of these nanoparticles cool down themselves how is more thermal energy supplied from the ihs to them? Via normal conduction which makes the radiative part of the thing irrelevant. This is before we even get to IR transparent cold plates.

However, perhaps there is some new physics involved. One should always keep an open mind with such things(no sarcasm, really) . For example no one a hundred years ago could imagine you could transmit a library of Congress worth of data in a second over radio waves. They would've called it impossible.

But, if there is new physics involved, why are you making consumer coolers with it rather than satellite/space cooling tech? One of the biggest limitations in space engineering is that all cooling in space is radiative(unless you're willing to loose mass). For example the international space station has radiators area as large as its solar panels to be able to cool people onboard and not let them slow cook in their own body heat. Likewise with many (especially RTG powered military) satellites. That's where money is if you have a revolutionary radiative cooling tech...

 

[maxwell_labs]

I don't want to discourage anyone from testing and I'm open to hearing the results, but let me be the first to call bull*** on the principle. Unless there is some truly novel physics involved radiative emissions at the temperatures we're working at are so small they can be disregarded completely.

For example, everything that has a temperature above absolute zero emits some IR, different materials emmit different amounts at the same temperature, but the absolute physical limit is a so called "ideal blackbody radiation" and there is a formula for it that depend on the area and temperature. So let's take 70C as our temperature (343K) and an area of an imaginary ihs of 4cm square. Plugging our numbers into the blackbody radiation formula we get 785W for a square meter of area or 0.314W for the area of our Ihs. This is a 100% negligible amount of radiation energy.

Now, one can imagine an obvious approach to increase this by increasing the surface area by introducing lots of tiny nanoparticles suspended in a medium transparent to IR. But then once each of these nanoparticles cool down themselves how is more thermal energy supplied from the ihs to them? Via normal conduction which makes the radiative part of the thing irrelevant. This is before we even get to IR transparent cold plates.

However, perhaps there is some new physics involved. One should always keep an open mind with such things(no sarcasm, really) . For example no one a hundred years ago could imagine you could transmit a library of Congress worth of data in a second over radio waves. They would've called it impossible.

But, if there is new physics involved, why are you making consumer coolers with it rather than satellite/space cooling tech? One of the biggest limitations in space engineering is that all cooling in space is radiative(unless you're willing to loose mass). For example the international space station has radiators area as large as its solar panels to be able to cool people onboard and not let them slow cook in their own body heat. Likewise with many (especially RTG powered military) satellites. That's where money is if you have a revolutionary radiative cooling tech...

Yes, this is truly a novel breakthrough that is happening right now in academia. You are 100% spot on about the benefits this technology can have in space applications. We are in active discussions with multiple government agencies.

I would encourage you to get familiar with the following white papers that go deep into what radiative cooling technology is capable of. Most of these papers have been written by Alejandro Rodriquez, who is a Ph.D. and Director of Materials Science and Engineering at Princeton University, and someone we work with.

Near-field RHT:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14475

https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.041403

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.013904

https://journals.aps.org/rmp/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.93.025009

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02049

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apl/article/121/19/193903/2834799/Efficiency-optimized-near-field

Active cooling (refrigeration):

https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-25-19-23164&id=372779

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/articl...field-refrigeration-and-tunable-heat-exchange

EM Limits:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-022-00468-w