The easiest way to keep your laptop running at peak efficiency is to just keep it cool and comfortable. Its processor can get pretty toasty crammed in that ultra-thin housing, so Thermaltake’s created a miniature portable air conditioner called the GOrb II that promises to keep your system comfortably cool, even if you’re not. More »
Scientists at Stanford University have just developed a new kind of cooling panel that may effectively reduce the cost of your air conditioning bill. The team, composed of Professor Shanhui Fan, and graduate students Aaswath Raman and Eden Rephaeli, wanted to achieve the goal of developing a structure that could cool buildings even while the sun is shining. They wanted to succeed “where others have come up short”.
What the cooling panel does is that it effectively reflects sunlight, and at the same time sends heat back into space. The team says that the reflection aspect is very important because many other reflectors are poorly engineered, so they absorb too much sunlight, defeating the entire point of their existence. With the reflectors on the team’s new cooling panel, the “vast majority of sunlight” is reflected.
The second part of the panel radiates heat, from the structure its on, back into space. The panel emits thermal radiation “within the crucial wavelength needed to escape the Earth’s atmosphere”. The Stanford team went in a different direction compared to other teams attempting to achieve the same goal. They used nanostructured photonic materials to engineer this part of their cooling panel. The material suppresses how much sunlight the panel absorbs, while also radiating it at the key frequency range required to escape the Earth’s atmosphere.
The great thing about this cooling panel is that it can be implemented not only in homes and buildings, but also in other structures such as cars. The panel is made up of both a thermal emitter and solar reflector, “making it both higher performance and much more robust and practically relevant.” The team believes that this panel can also substitute for solar panels. For example, being placed on a single-family home, it can “offset 35% of its air conditioning needs during the hottest hours of summer,” even if it only takes up 10% of the roof.
The cooling panel is mainly passive. You stick it onto your roof, or onto the sides of a building and it starts working. The team believes that this panel will be very useful because many people live in very hot regions of the Earth, causing a rapid rise in electrical demand due to so many air conditioners being used. This panel is both economically and environmentally friendly. It will help people save money on air conditioning bills, and will cool people’s homes without the need of using any resources.
[via Stanford]
Stanford scientists design cooling panels that cools structures during the day is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
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We’ve all got refrigerators to keep our leftovers not-rotten, but compared to National Institute of Standards and Technology’s latest creation, our hulking cooling boxes hardly compare. This tiny quantum prototype, no bigger than a few inches, packs as much power as a window air conditioner the size of the Lincoln Memorial. More »
We’re often disappointed when ‘cool‘-looking inventions never come to market, but it looks like the dual-piezo jet fans we saw in GE’s labs recently have a fighting chance. The company told us at CES 2013 that it wants to team with Texas Instruments to put the millimeter-thick, bellows-like units inside upcoming Ultrabooks and other devices that have no room for a traditional fan. Such a partnership could work out since GE has little experience in the gadget-space, and TI has all the power conversion bits necessary to make the tech work, since they’re similar to the latter outfit’s circuits used in so-called high-definition haptics, a tactile feedback system. Representatives from the two outfits said that manufacturers are already working with the tech, meaning we could see the technology in slimmed down products like Ultrabooks within a year — perhaps just in time to meet Haswell’s demanding specs.
Filed under: Peripherals
We’ve seen plenty of extreme cooling systems in the past, but Mike Schropp has taken things to the limit: he’s built a computer that’s cooled by a wind tunnel. More »
I’ve gotten used to my computer rig making lots of noise, when it’s totally quiet, it usually indicates some sort of a hardware failure. Some computers run 24/7 and generate a lot of heat because getting work done. While there are certainly some machines out there that have no fans and are pretty quiet, Redditor DeFex wanted to build a rig that was completely silent, by doing away with fans, and all other moving parts.
His DIY silent computer features a 65W Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor, so it’s powerful enough to handle all his media center needs. A solid state disk replaces a traditional IDE drive, which gets noisy. SSDs also generate less heat. This system also has no DVD or Blu-ray drive. In order to cool this computer, DeFex picked up a large 10″×7″ heatsink from HeatSinkUSA, which draws away heat from the motherboard.
The case includes some parts that were 3d-printed using a MakerBot 3D. The overall project is pretty cool, though it’s still a work in progress. You can check out more pics of the build over on imgur.
[via Liliputing]
Apple had a couple of new patent applications published by the USPTO today (spotted by AppleInsider), including one detailing how internal fans could be made to fit mobile devices to help dissipate heat, and another for headphones that become speakers for when listening goes from private to shared scenarios, which even describes how in-ear models could work that way.
The patent for internal fans includes a design that combines device physical feedback along with cooling powers to save space compared to when those components are separate. In one permutation, there’s also a design for taking air in through existing holes like a headphone or connector port, and expelling excess heat through the same mechanism. That would also help with space-saving efforts.
In terms of its likelihood for actual use, I’d guess that it probably won’t be employed in a shipping product, but instead represents one line of Apple’s thinking about how to cool mobile devices, but not the one they ended up spending much time on. The more logical path seems to have been to work on processor efficiency, which Apple is clearly committed to with its in-house processor design and engineering efforts.
Headphones that do double duty as external speakers is a much more practical and likely invention, looking at Apple’s product release history. It describes methods for turning both external on-ear type headphones into speakers with rotating ear cups, and ways to make even in-ear headphones like Apple’s own EarPods into speakers powerful enough for multiple people to enjoy. The headphones in all cases can detect their orientation, and even their proximity to a user’s ear to determine in which mode they should be operating.
Apple is clearly still interested in evolving its headphone design, since in introduced the new EarPods alongside the iPhone 5. And external speakers for iOS devices are consistently strong performers in terms of accessory categories. The main concern would be quality: making drivers small enough but powerful enough to sound good at any decent volume would be a significant engineering challenge.
Apple was granted a couple of interesting patents today (spotted by AppleInsider), including one for multitouch surfaces embedded in devices that appear and disappear as needed, as well as a new cooling apparatus design that can redirect air to where it’s needed most within a device. One is just a twist on tech Apple already uses, and the other is something that could address warm lap issues everywhere.
The first patent for “microperforation illumination” covers some designs already found in Apple’s Mac computers, specifically the sleep and power lights that glow through the aluminum casings of its computers seemingly without a dedicated opening for doing so. It describes the tech that allows for light to shine through tiny, nearly invisible holes punched in a metal surface, but expands on the concept considerably by discussing ways in which to control the resulting light, and a means through which microperforation can be combined with touch controls.
One implementation described in the patent features an Apple logo like the one found on the lid of MacBooks, except composed entirely of microperforations so that it vanishes completely when the computer is asleep or shut down. Other uses could be in interface devices like mice and keyboards, to provide key illumination in a manner more aesthetically pleasing than current keyboard backlighting or to indicated contextually relevant touch controls on an otherwise unmarked trackpad, for instance.
The other interesting patent granted to Apple today describes a “method and apparatus for cooling electronic devices,” which differs from your standard internal computer fans. It employs a solid state air moving device called an ionic wind pump that can redirect air to specific parts of a computer’s internals, using magnets to dictate the path of cool air. Internal sensors could detect exactly where cooling is needed most, and the pump system could target that area for maximum effect, reducing power demands and wear on cooling systems and computer components.
This would help with keeping noise levels down, and also Apple describes its potential for both computers and mobile devices, so it could also alleviate some of the heat issues we’ve seen users note in the past with regards to iPads and iPhones. It’s not exactly clear how this system would compare to mechanical fans in terms of physical footprint, but it could also theoretically provide a space savings advantage, crucial to Apple’s ever-slimming case designs.
How likely are these designs to make their way into shipping products? Well Apple already uses microperforation lighting effects on its hardware, so an expansion of that is definitely feasible. I find it hard to imagine the company making its iconic logo invisible when a computer isn’t in active use, but that particular use of the tech would lead to amazingly sparse industrial design, which could become iconic in itself. And alternative ways to cool computers that decrease power requirements and make those efforts more invisible to the end user definitely seems like a pursuit Apple would consider worthwhile, but it could also tackle the issue from other directions, including processor engineering. Still, compared to a lot of Apple patents, these are hardly far-fetched designs in terms of their potential for inclusion in future shipping devices.
You can already buy shirts and other garments specifically designed to keep you cool while battling the heat, but they’re no where near as revolutionary as this refreshing Cold Foam. It comes ready-to-spray like a can of silly string, and once released the foam immediately chills to just over 1 degree Fahrenheit, and stays that cold for up to five minutes. More »
Air cooled computers are for wimps. But while the idea of keeping temperatures in check using water might be a step in the right direction, Intel is doing something even more radical: it’s dunking entire servers—the whole lot—into oil to keep them chill. More »
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