Convection Watercooling Engineering

[Blundar]

This may be another one of those "don't go posting to the highly technical forum while you are tired threads" but...

I was playing around at work with my mocha and I noticed something from the mixing of the drink... The hot stuff was rising and the cold stuff was falling. (DUH!)

Would it be possible to design a watercooling system that was based on convection currents as opposed to a pump? I figure using a very large resevoir (or maybe two resevoirs - one above and one below the waterblock) might provide enough water, but anyone have any creative ideas on how to maximize convection action?

If it would not be feasible to use convection for water transfer, would it be possible to design a watercooling system designed to use convection as a fallback in the event of a main pump failure?

I'm not necessarily looking for a solution for dissipating a huge amount of heat here (i.e. overclocking) I was thinking of something more along the line of a reliable cooling system for a 1U rackmount dual athlon, for example.

Feedback/suggestions appreciated.

 

[BurntKooshie]

They're called "heat pipes" (well, that's one option), and the guy over at benchtest.com has already written a few articles about it.

Read them:

here
here
and here

This is more technical than most questions in these other forums, but (IMO), it still fits under a diff category (either cases and cooling or overclocking).

 

[Blundar]

thanks for the heatpipe links!!!
Those were really cool. One of my good friends does HVAC work for a living so I have access to a lot of the tools + chems we'd need.

 

[Maehdros]

I don't think this would be a good process for some reasons :

First water convection would be too slow. Heat transfer isn't fast enough in comparison to heat transfer on metal solid, even if it is not convection but conduction (not sure of the english term). It's like sound. The densier the medium, the faster and better the sound is conducted.

Water or liquid could be used instead of fans because the can absorb much more heat than air. Remember that in usual cooler, you have some metal (aluminium, copper,...) and this metal has to get cooled by the fans. This is not the most efficient but it's cheap and efficient enough to get the CPU cool.

Imagine a cooling system that would have water instead of fans... that could work...but not easy to make.

The actual water system works to refresh a platter of metal. You've got a couple of two things that works together :

- Metal is very efficient to conduct heat.
- Water (or liquid) have a big calorific capacity. See it like a heat capacitor.

In these situation you need to cool the liquid, then take the heat from the metal to the liquid and you're on.