Sandia National Laboratories are a big company with a lot of visions and “missions” to do. They are also in charge of ensuring that U.S. nuclear arsenal is safe, secure and reliable. They are also doing research on killing cancer cells with nanotechnology. Anyway, they have also developed a new thing for Computer environments.
Sandia National Laboratories have now developed a new technology which has the potential to dramatically change the air-cooling for computers and microelectronics, and now lab officials are seeking for licenses in the electronics chip cooling area to license and commercialize the device.
This new “Sandia Cooler” is also known as the “Air Bearing Heat Exchanger” is developed by the Sandia researcher, Jeff Koplow, who was recently selected to take part in the NAE’s 17th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium by the National Academy of Engineering.
This Sandia Cooler will significantly reduce the energy needed to cool down processor chips in large computing environments and data centers.
In a regular/normal CPU cooler, the heat transfer bottleneck is the boundary layer of air that clings to the cooling fins. Though with the new Sandia Cooler, the heat is efficiently transferred across a tiny narrow air gap from a stationary base to a rotating structure.
The normally boundary layer of air surrounding the cooling fins is subjected to a powerful centrifugal pumping effect, causing boundary layer thickness to be reduced up to ten times thinner than normal. This reduction enables a dramatic improvement in cooling performance.