World’s First Powerless Air Cooler on a Mainboard

Just got back from a great two week vacation and to start off I just read this article about the world’s first powerless (yup, it doesn’t use electricity on the heat sink fan) air cooler on motherboards. With all the thrust towards ECO friendly designs these days, this heat-powered design for heat sinks is a very “cool” idea.

MSI has actually created a heat sink cooling design that doesn’t use electricity for the fan. The fan is instead powered by the very heat generated by the CPU. Although it will probably score any points on power savings for you as an individual, think of how much power it can save if you consider the millions of computers on the planet.

The design makes use of the property of hot air expansion to power the heat sink’s cooling fan. The stylish innovation boasts of an efficiency of 70% conversion of heat to air power which is more than double that of a similar design that uses solar power.

The concept was based on the age old concept of Stirling engines created as far back as 1800’s. It utilizes the basic process of air when changes in temperature arises. These are cooling, compression, heating and expansion.

As heat is generated by the electronic chips, this heat is transferred to a pump that move the cooling fan. when the cooling fan starts moving this cools down the heat sink attached to the chip. The cooling action will make the pump contract. The cycles continue as the chips go through the process of heating and cooling.

This should be very interesting to see since, the system should be able to react to minute changes in temperature for the cycle to work.

As a proof of concept MSI will be demoing the powerless air cooler for heat sinks at the CeBIT.