Cutting-edge heat pipes for improved electronics cooling

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

"Many of the most profound technological advances in modern society have been enabled by a relentless increase in the computing power of electronic devices. We have become accustomed to significant yearly advances in the functionality of these devices, along with reduction in weight, improvements in lifetime, and many other features. This technological push has brought these devices right to the physical limits of the processes on which they rely. One particular bottleneck that is becoming increasingly prominent is the thermal management of consumer electronics. Heat pipes have become the technology of choice for the thermal management of laptops, high-end cell phones, and several aerospace applications. However, this technology has not evolved sufficiently fast to keep up with the cooling requirements of modern computer chips, and, as a result, computer chips are now programmed to limit their computing power to avoid thermal damage.The core material used in current heat pipes relies on thermal sintering of copper powder, which is a slow and energy intensive process and is unable to satisfy the cooling requirements of modern electronic devices. _Microfoam_, a University of Cambridge spin-off, seeks to optimize and scale-up a disruptive new metal foam to capture a share of the rapidly growing heat pipe market. The heat pipe technology developed by _Microfoam_ is a manufacturing process that is faster, less energy intensive, allows for the fabrication of thinner heat pipes with new form factors, and, importantly, enables a step-improvement in performance of commercial devices that have not seen significant changes in four decades."