Phase change cooling for laptops

Hi all, I'm an engineering student and I've just had a crazy idea, and i would like you guys to give your 2 cents on it

I was thinking about maybe creating a phase change cooling system for a laptop, similar to the fan cooler you may be using for your laptop right now. The advantage of course is that fans are limited by the ambient temp a lot more than phase change coolers are.

Just wondered if any of you guys would be interested in buying one .

Few answers to questions you may have:

no i havent made one yet
i'm not sure of price
this idea is about 2 minutes old

 

Its been done, but its a full mod not just a cooler that you can add to a existing laptop.

Once you start introducing temperatures cooler than the ambient surrounding air you will cause condensation, aka water.

Water inside of your laptop is BAD.

So for it to work everything must be sealed properly and you want the cooler to directly contact the areas needing to be cooled (aka heatpipes or heatsink) rather than using cooler air for the entire system.

 

As Vicious mentioned, phase change is not for the faint of heart and you really need to be on your toes when working with it.

As an aside, while a phase change setup would be cool in a laptop (I guess), it kind of defeats the entire purpose of a laptop in the first place, namely its portability...

 

Lol phase change cooling is nothing compared to liquid cooling for laptops. Now that would make me super-nervous, lol...

Mr. Mysterious

 

Phase change is liquid cooling due to condensation, and its actually colder and better than liquid cooling and much harder to do.

Liquid cooling is cake, especially with so many closed loop products out there today that are easy to mod.

Since your just using the water to aid with heat disipation in conjuction with a radiator it works better than air in most cases but your never actually introducing temperatures cooler than the native air temp around the laptop so it cant get cooler than the air you have.

Phase change actually can, it can form ICE given how extreme you want to go with it.

A popular alternative that can give you the benefit of both that is not as hard to manage is the hybrid of the two. A chilled water system. DIY people often use stuff like what you may find in a regular water fountain to cool the water loop.

None of this extreme stuff is really needed unless your overvolting like hell and trying to set world records for overclocking.

 

Are you referring to an external phase change cooler? I'm pretty sure all laptops currently use the same process internally with the use of heat pipes because they are efficient and small.

Vicious is right about getting too cold, you will form condensation. Another option might be thermo electric cooling but that also has the same condensation issue. I honestly think laptops should be equipped with over-engineered cooling systems from the factory so we never have to worry about it at all. It won't cost them THAT much more for some better designed heatsink fins, a backup heat pipe, and a higher capacity fan.

 

I have thought a lot about this in the past and always decide against it.

I actually had one on an old desktop system 10+ years ago and the steps you had to go through to keep condensation from damaging everything was a total pain and voided any warranty you might have had.

Plus, it is VERY energy inefficient and there is no way you could enclose it all into your laptop case so you would have to have an external system to power it all and that would take away any mobility your laptop had.

NOW, if you could rig up some type of thermal system where it would read the ambient temperature then turn on/off the cooling as needed to keep it say +5-10C above ambient, that would help a lot in reducing condensation except for right around the processor itself.

SO, you would still have to pack the processor in dielectric grease to combat this and it still would not be portable and and and and etc........

But, if you go for it.... take lots of pictures

D.