Sweet cooling idea.

[dude]

I was talking to someone in television and he mentioned a cooling set up that a tape recorder used. In stead of a common heatsink and fan they a copper pipe between the chip and board. The copper pipe then led to a heat sink and fan, but the cool part was that the copper pipe was hollow and filled with liquid sodium. The liquid sodium conducted the heat so well that no pump was needed to circulate it. This one set up was also good enough to cool multiple chips per pipe and heatsink. This got me thinking about new ideas about cooling. Using this set up you could effectively remove most of the heat from your system. The only problem is how to adapt the copper pipe from underneath the chip to above the chip.

P.S. I think it was liquid sodium.

 

[Hoot]

Liquid Sodium is an excellent heat conductor, but it's some bad-*** stuff. If moisture hits it it will outgas major quantities of Hydrogen gas and to my knowledge, DC fans have brushes and stators that spark. Oh the humanity!

Hoot

 

[Mr_Goat]

Where the hell are you supposed to find some liquid sodium??? I've never seen something like that...then again I haven't cracked open many tapedecks...

 

[FunkyTechnician]

I remember my professor doing an experiment in freshman chemistry class with a Na based compound. The teacher wanted to show how volitile it was (it's in column 1 on the periodic table if memory serves right---->extremely reactive). She put about 1 drop of NA in a glass beaker with water and drop was bouncing aroung like mad and produced a flame.

Pretty scary stuff

Amiel

 

[SP]

I doubt that the tube had sodium in it, but if it did then it took advantage of the fact that sodium melts at a relatively low temperature and it must have relied on convection currents in the liquid sodium to transfer the heat.

Anyway, what was more likely the case was that the tube your describing was a heat pipe and contained a liquid that boiled at right around room temperature. See this link for more details on Heat pipes and how they work.

http://www.norenproducts.com/Heat_Pipe_Introduction.html

Anyway, a heat pipe would be better than a tube filled with sodium.