Taiwan’s Micro-Star International (MSI) recently demonstrated a power design that can cool a PC motherboard
without electricity [1]. The design employs a fan that is powered only by the movement of heat and air, using an approach known as the
Stirling Engine Theory [2]. It is named for Robert Stirling, a Scottish pastor of the early 1800s who grew concerned about the danger workers in his parish faced from steam engines of the era, which were prone to explosions. He invented the heat economizer, which uses hot air rather than steam.
In MSI’s demo, the “Air Power Cooler” transfers the chipset waste heat into air momentum. As the air becomes hot, it exerts upward force on a piston, which in turn drives a fan that cools the heatsink. The company demonstrated the technology recently at the CeBIT technology show. Can it scale to handle higher heat loads? See
Hexus [3] and
Tweaktown [1] for more details. There are also YouTube videos of an
animation illustrating the concept [4] and a brief clip of
the unit in action [5] (it’s about 25 seconds into a longer MSI CeBit promo).
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com
URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/04/11/taiwan-firm-demos-cooling-without-electricity/
URLs in this post:
[1] without electricity: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/9051/msi_employees_stirling_engine_theory/index.html
[2] Stirling Engine Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
[3] Hexus: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=12110
[4] animation illustrating the concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG36EIFNI-Y&feature=related
[5] the unit in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqqeR4ZRx6w&feature=related
[6] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
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