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There's actually NOTHING inside ThermoEngine's HeatPipe.... Check this out...

This is nothing new, Kyle cut one in half about a month ago and told us this. What did Overclockers.com not believe him or something? This is a pointless article...



<< Well actually, there is something: Good marketing hype >>



Thats from the article... whats funny is that Thermosonic never said there was anything inside, how is that marketing hype?
 
Really a yellow substance?



<< Well, we got tired of guessing and cut it open. Looks to be a &quot;simple&quot; heat pipe type of device on the inside. We did not notice any fluid or pressure release when we split it open, but then again, we cut it open in the garage with a hacksaw. >>



All he said was there was a stain on the inside... but thats all he said.
 
A heatpipe is just a pipe filled with vacuum, and a tiny amount of a liquid - usually distilled water.

The amount of water used is so small that it is easily missed - in a heat pipe as small as that opened it's usually only a few microlitres (millionths of a litre).

I have to confess, though, that I am rather unconvinced that this heatsink does actually use a heat pipe in the conventional sense
 
Why would you want a substance in there? The idea is to insulate, not store heat from the central cavity. Heat travels through aluminum very quickly as it is, far faster than it can through air. Most heatsinks form a pool of heat above the heat's origin because of how heat flows through the mass. The hollow cavity simply ensures that the heat doesn't pool over its origin.
 
MadRat,

Heatpipe is a special technical term referring to a heat transfer device using phase change to transfer heat roughly the way that Mark R described it. It is a small vacuum tube with a small amount of liquid in it. The liquid could be water to sodium, depending on the temperature that it is designed for. The liquid evaporate at the hot end and condense at the cold end. It allows the heatpipe to transfer a much larger amount of heat than conduction by alumnium of the same volume. The liquid form is transferred back from the cold end to the hot end by surface effect.

You can find heatpipe in most devices used in space.

I also agree with Mark R that ThermoEngine may not use the term heatpipe in the conventional sense.
 
Maybe it was a [solid] that instantaneously evaporated after Kyle cut it open? 😛

edit- my bad, gas doesn't evaporate.. hehe
 
Usually, there is a wicking device which transfers the liquid from the condensing end (cold end) back to the hot end to be evaporated again. Since these are so short it could be that gravity is what takes the liquid back to the hot end - but that would mean it would be orientation sensitive.

The space based heat pipes have been shown to conduct heat at 100X-1000X what a solid conductor would do.
DynaOne
 
but can the temperature gradient along the pipe be sufficient to allow vaporization energies to work effectively? not as optimally efficient as in space 😉
 
There is definitely a gradient needed from the hot to cold end, to give some margin on the temperature at which the liquid evaporates - but generally speaking the difference doesn't need to be that wide. The liquid evaporates at the same temperature it condenses, but absorbs/rejects a lot of heat as it crosses the temperature boundary. I've seen papers of pipes working with as little at 20F gradient from hot to cold end. The question in my mind (for this thread), is how is the liquid getting back to the hot end after it condenses.
DynaOne
 
Travis,
Normally capillary action &quot;is&quot; what is used to return the liquid, but usually there is some kind of &quot;wick&quot; inside the tube to facilitate that. If these tubes are just large cylindrical holes without edges ridges or anything - I'm not getting how its working.
DynaOne
 
The heat may move 1000x faster, but the recycling of the matter COULD NEVER equate to an efficient enough design considering the shear amount of heat being conducted off a cpu. Then you add in the fact that such a thin heatsink probably becomes saturated from heat the gradient becomes too small to matter.

Heatpipes of this size may work for tiny projects. Again, like I said previously, it would not be for anything more than an insulator in this application. They'd of had better results with a tiny peltier trapped in that vacuum-sealed cavity. 😉
 
MadRat,
I agree - eventually the heat has to be rejected to the environment. It would seem the only reason to use a heat pipe would be to move the heat to where you could have more surface area for fins. Having higher thoughput fans and greater area in the heat rejection fins still seems to be best low end solution for greater total heat rejection. I suspect (as earlier posts mentioned) that this heat pipe implementation is more of a marketing ploy.
DynaOne
 
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