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Next-generation heatsink has no fan at all


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Sandia Cooler is a new type of air-cooled heat exchanger, much more efficient that the traditional heatsink+fan combination. And it's extremely quiet, dust-immune too.

Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have created what they describe as “a radically new architecture for air-cooled heat exchangers”, incredibly efficient compared to the traditional fan+heatsink setup, quiet and even immune to dust.

Sandia Cooler achieved such a feat with a quite simple design where the metal heatsink itself is the fan: “heat is efficiently transferred from a stationary base plate to a rotating (counterclockwise) structure that combines the functionality of cooling fins with a centrifugal impeller”, Sandia Labs official site explains, while the cooler is powered by a “brushless” motor in the middle of the device.

The new cooler is 30 times more efficient than a traditional setup, Sandia Labs researchers state, 10 times smaller compared to a high-end commercial unit available nowadays but with the same cooling performance. Furthermore Sandia Cooler is immune to dust layering because it spin at a constant 2000 RPM speed, while the centrifugal forces constantly push the dust particles out of the device.

Among the potential applications for its cooler, Sandia Labs – a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation and two major research and development laboratories belonging to the United States Department of Energy – list laptop and “high performance ‘gaming’ PCs”, gaming consoles, LED lightning, automotive, “other” electronic devices and “any device comprising one or more forced-air exchangers”.

The market debut of Sandia Cooler should happen soon, too: the researchers say that two yet-to-be-named companies – one working in the computer cooling business and the other one in the LED lighting business – have already licensed their promising technology.

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Shut up and take my money. :P

Lets see how it goes. No one ever thought about this before?

PS. The motor sound one hears in the video will not be audible when the final product arrives.

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I'm sceptical. Will the blade fall off when you lift your computer to stand up? lol. I get the impression it only works in the horizontal orientation.

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I'm sceptical. Will the blade fall off when you lift your computer to stand up? lol. I get the impression it only works in the horizontal orientation.

A comment on neowin (original article):

Are you sure the air bearing tech they talk about will work vertically?

Edit found this on their documentation

https://ip.sandia.gov/techpdfs...croelectronics%20Market.pdf

Q: Can the device be mounted in any orientation?

A: yes

This is nice! No more fan and dust related problems!

Actually, there will be some dust, but not as much as we see on a stationary heatsink, rather the amount we see on the big-ass fan itself, which is quite less and wipe-able. :)

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Shut up and take my money. :P

Lets see how it goes. No one ever thought about this before?

PS. The motor sound one hears in the video will not be audible when the final product arrives.

you probably can still hear it big diffrence will be the fact its sealed in a computer case which will likely block most of the noise
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