Cooling

On some summer days and nights, a good fan is all you need to keep your cool. But often it’s a case of being in the right place at the right time if you want to benefit from old-fashioned fan technology. The Segula Double-Circulator doesn’t just blow the air into the room like any other ordinary fan. Instead, it circulates the air in the whole room via two independent heads, which the manufacturers say is more healthy than a fan directly aimed at your body. The Double-Circulator also has an integrated ionizer to keep the air fresh.  Read More

It’s easy to think of the Internet as something that’s just “out there” in cyberspace, that doesn’t effect the physical world in any tangible way. In 2009, however, it was estimated that Internet data centers worldwide consumed about 2% of global electricity production. Not only did most of that electricity undoubtedly come from non-green sources, but it also cost the global economy approximately 30 billion US dollars. Much of the electricity was needed to power the data centers’ forced air cooling systems, that keep the servers from overheating. Now, researchers from IBM Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) have devised a much more efficient method for cooling the steamy Internet - they use hot water.  Read More

We've seen vertically oriented transistors, now it's time for entire chips to explore the z-axis. Collaborating with Swiss research institutes EPFL and ETH Zurich, IBM has made another important step toward creating faster, higher-efficiency "3D" processors stacking their cores vertically to increase the number of interconnections and sensibly reduce heat.  Read More

Prototype roof tiles that turn white to reflect heat when they get hot seem like a pretty cool idea, as do tiles that turn black to absorb heat when it’s cold. That’s why a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduates has won the third annual MIT MADMEC (Making and Designing Materials Engineering Contest) by demonstrating their thermally-activated, color-changing, roofing material called “Thermeleon” (as in chameleon).  Read More

The ancient lotus leaf has natural properties that scientists believe could prove beneficial in today's modern world. Already Gizmag has featured articles about the lotus leaf surface, including a self-cleaning cup and a transparent coating for space suits. Recently, though, in an effort to improve the efficiency of modern engineering systems, such as power plants and some electronic equipment that must be cooled by removing heat through water evaporation and condensation, engineers at Duke University have been studying the lotus leaf. Using an ultra high-speed camera, a powerful microscope and an audio speaker, scientists were able to observe water as it condensed on the leaf's surface, and more importantly, how the water condensate disappeared.  Read More

While working on their long-term goal of achieving a true quantum computer, a team of researchers from Stanford University, the Joint Quantum Institute, MIT and Texas A&M University has recently discovered that tiny nitrogen impurities in diamonds make outstanding magnetic probes in the cellular and molecular scale, with important applications that could truly benefit medical research.  Read More

As an increasing number of hybrid-powered vehicles move from concept to completion, technology is battling to keep pace with some of the less-publicized technical challenges found among the complex electronics aboard these land- and air-based vehicles, computers and other devices. For instance, how do you effectively cool the electronics in a high-power electric motor that propels a passenger car from 0-60mph in under 10 seconds and uses regenerative braking to stop? Researchers in the U.S. believe the secret may lie in understanding precisely how fluid boils in tiny ‘microchannels’, which has led them to develop formulas and models that will help engineers design unique systems to cool high-power electronics found in today’s and tomorrow’s devices.  Read More

The availability of increasingly powerful computer graphics cards is placing ever-greater demands on keeping things cool “under the hood”. Certain to have gaming enthusiasts sitting up and taking notice is BFG Technologies' announcement of the release of two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200 series graphics cards featuring their built-in liquid cooling solutions. Designed to be installed “out of the box and maintenance-free”, the GTX 285 H20+ and GTX 295 H20C offer high performance water-cooled video cards without the fuss.  Read More

Liquid-cooled PCs are a mainstay for PC enthusiasts looking to eek every last bit of performance from their beloved machines and now it seems this approach has reached the world of the LED light bulb. A company called Eternaleds has introduced the HydraLux-4 LED Bulb, the world’s first LED light bulb to use "liquid-cooling technology" to give a true 360-degree light like a regular incandescent light bulb.  Read More