Anyone who is even a little concerned with the hardware of their own computer will come across the term sooner rather than laterHeatpipe
. You can find them in graphics cards, CPUs, graphics card coolers, smartphones and of course in notebooks. But what does such a heat pipe actually mean?
The heat pipe has revolutionized cooling
The headline may seem exaggerated at first, but modern computers would actually be unthinkable without the inconspicuous heat pipe. Without a heat pipe, the classic cooling would be a heat sink that is placed directly on the component that emits waste heat. This is followed by a fan that uses the air sucked in to cool down the heated cooling fins of the heat sink.
Since the height or thickness of the case in a notebook is very limited due to its design, you could only install extremely flat coolers. Today's CPUs and GPUs definitely could not be operated with such a cooling solution in a mobile computer.
In order to tame waste heat of 100 watts or more in a flat notebook, the heat has to be carried away from the point where it is generated.
There are now two options: Firstly, the waste heat could be removed using a liquid cooling medium. The cooling medium, for example distilled water, absorbs the heat and transports it to a heat exchanger (radiator), which releases the heat into the environment. This is the principle of classic water cooling.
You can probably already see the problem yourself: installing a complete water cooling system in a notebook without external components is quite difficult if you don't want the computer to be as thick as a briefcase. So that leaves option number two: the heat pipe.
The Asus Zephyrus G14 scores with very efficient cooling. You can find the test here
How it works
A heat pipe consists of an airtight metal tube, in the IT sector it is usually copper, which can be round, like in a CPU cooler, or flat and wide like in a notebook. The functional principle is always the same.
The heat pipe is filled with the so-called working medium. This can be, for example, water or alcohol. In addition to the liquid, there is also a metal mesh in the tube that forms a capillary structure.
Part of the heat pipe is located on or immediately next to the heat source, in our case it is above a CPU. When the computer is turned on, the processor starts working and gets hot.
The liquid inside the heat pipe now undergoes a phase change. This means nothing other than that their state changes from liquid to gaseous.
The evaporated medium then spreads towards the cold side of the heat pipe. If the heat source is in the middle of the heat pipe, the evaporated working medium expands to both sides; this principle is also used in many notebooks.
Once it reaches the cold side, the heat absorbed is transferred to the heat exchanger and the working medium is condensed. Through the capillary action of the metal mesh inside the heat pipe, the condensate returns to the heat source and the process described begins again.
It should be noted that a heat pipe itself does not cool. It simply absorbs heat from one point and transports it to another point where it is released to a heat sink.
Advantages
- Compared to a pipe made of solid aluminum or copper, a heat pipe works significantly more efficiently due to its high thermal conductivity.
- A heat pipe works completely passively and therefore requires neither a pump nor a fan to transfer the waste heat.
- Since the heat pipe works passively, it is completely maintenance-free and is not subject to wear.
- Heat pipes can be manufactured flexibly in terms of shape and size. This means that it can be used even in particularly tight spaces.
- The liquid used inside a heat pipe can be flexibly adapted to the ambient conditions. For example, ammonia can be used instead of water at extremely low temperatures.
Vapor Chamber
Basically, a vapor chamber works on the same principle as a heat pipe. The big difference is that the vapor chamber has a significantly larger contact surface to the heat source. But the connection to the heat sink is also larger than with a heat pipe.
This results in a higher heat output with the vapor chamber than with the heat pipe. Since it is more complex and more expensive to produce than a normal heat pipe, a vapor chamber is usually only found in expensive notebooks.
Are you interested in how the hardware in your computer works or is that less relevant?
