Markus Leonhardt has come up with an ingenious way to cool his computer. He
immerses the entire thing in vegetable oil:
Markus Leonhardt has taken the shortest route possible to liquid cooling.
1. throw motherboard in fish tank
2. cover in vegetable oil
3. there is no step 3
Markus has been using this system for over a year. it is quiet and is cooled by the still functional fans circulating the oil. he has swapped components and even successfully used pulled hardware in other pcs.
This just boggles my mind. Wouldn't immersing your computer in vegetable oil short circuit it, or something like that? I also would have thought it would overload the fan motors. There are
color pictures of the Oil Computer here, as well as more description, though most of it is in German. (via
Reality Carnival)
Comments
As far as the fans go, they should work pretty well, and most newer systems let you control fan speed. Set it low so it's not overtaxing itself.
I imagine it'd work best with those 'copper fan' fanless heat sinks, along with a small 'case' fan stirring the mix..
Speaking of Case Fans, I'd like to do a mod someday where I take one of those huge square room fans and bolt it to the side.. I've seen a jury-rigged version, but I'm thinking the real deal..
Seriously though I don't think the fish would enjoy it too much.
- OR -
Elvis can finally relate to computing.
They wouldn't swim around for long. Distilled water would cause just about any fish to die rapidly of osmotic shock (in non-aquaristic terms, its body would be absorbing water much faster than it could get rid of it). I don't know how much dissolved solids you could have in the water before it would start shorting out the electronics, but I would guess not very much. Also, the fishes that come from the softest native waters also tend to come from the most acid waters, which would probably make everything corrode pretty fast. Finally, I don't know what the average temperature of the water in such a system would be, but if were above about 85 degrees F, it would kill all but a very few species of fish.
Would your hard drive freeze?
Also you can't submerge the hard disks in the oil as they are not completely sealed - there is a hole with a microfilter to keep the air pressure equal to the outside pressure and this will allow oil to get in.
The reason this is used commercially is because oil has a higher specific heat capacity than air - also it ensures that all components can be cooled well. There is also less noise and no dust can be drawn into the system from nasty fans. The oil itself can be pumped away to be cooled by either a radiator or a phase-change system 〈fridge〉.
Have a look at this website for some guys who did a similar project using a synthetic ester.
One issue i do have with this is that doesn't oil absorb water from the atmosphere? My friends father (total geek) did a test of this about 4 years ago. He got vegetable oil and put it into a cup and has let it sit there up untill now. After 2 years the oil had water molecules mixed inside it from absorption from the atmosphere. Now normally that wouldn't be a problem because water is in fact more dense than oil, but even so after many many years you would still have small amounts of water molecules suspended inside the oil. So im guessing that the "oil computer" has to obviously have its oil changed every so often months. Which would really shit me as i am poor and lazy and don't like to re-do things that i have already set up.
I also read somewhere about someone who put dry ice on the bottom of the oil as to keep the oil cool. Because it sublimes and is never a liquid it would just pass through the oil, whether or not its conductive i have no idea. He overclocked it to about 2 times as fast as the core speed. He eventually poured liquid nitrogen over it and the whole system stopped... Would have been interesting though...
So, although i do think oil will cool his system, I doubt very much that the fans would operate for very long before burning out do to the viscosity of the vegetable oil.
I started testing cooling using mineral oil. I am still making sure everything will work fine in the oil. I plan on seeing how far I can overclock it.
http://haphazardhacks.blogspot.com/2005/07/ever-since-i-first-saw-oilcomputer-i.html
Or is this why they use liquid Nitrogen in some electronic systems?
I got the idea from this site: http://64.45.45.116/index.html
1
set up a bowl with tabwater
set up a bowl with oil
2
buy yourrself a voltmeter, wires, battery, lightbulb (small one)
3
make a circuit with the bulb, voltmeter, wires and battery
4
leave two wires unconnected
close the circuit by placing the wire-ends in the water, LET THEM NOT TOUCH EACH OTHER!
5
watch your volt-meter
5b
add salt to the water (1 spoon or so), stire the water
6
step 4, but with oil
7
redo step 5
conclusion: oil does not short-circuit
conclusion 2: oil is an insulator
conclusion 3: added salt in the water = lover insulation (=higher conduction)
WARNING do not try this with ac homepower! you get killed or wounded!
your processor off your mother bord then you could cool it all sorts of ways!
1800 mhz Pentium 4
Nvidia Geforce 4 MX420 64 meg video card
256 M/bytes PC2700 DDR RAM
And a measly 6.2 gig hard drive which has just barely enough space for Windows XP Professional and some proggies like winamp and some good MP3s.
No oil yet, waiting a couple of weeks until my HS science fair to fill it up, but it looks really trippy.
dear diary,
i got high today for the first time, it was fun and then i noticed my pc was running very loudly, well of course me being high made me very irratated. so i went to the kitchen to get somethin to eat, remember im high. i grabbed random things and returned to the computer. i grabbed wat i thought was a 2 liter of soda i of course soon found out wat it was, and dropped the bottle, uh oh oils not for computers. but then i noticed it was still runing i of course thought this was entirely possible so i ran to the local walmart, literally ran. i bout a fish tank and oil, i was set for this expiriment. i put all my computer stuff in the tank except for the cd-rom drive and psu then poored in the oil the computer was still working. i thought i was a genious. now as i look back, that took a hella long time to clean up and i never did eat anything.
this was of course in german
Cheers!
2) Unless you were using an external keyboard and mouse, your keyboard would get junked up pretty fast from the oil.
3) Just because a PC is in oil doesn't mean it doesn't still need its heatsinks and fans. With a laptop, the heatsink and more specifically the fan are much weaker than those of a desktop. The fan would burn up rather quickly and you would have no circulation, causing your laptop to overheat.
4) Unless you physically removed all of the laptop casing, you would do MORE damage to your laptop than good by submerging it. Think about it, if you have a big fish tank with several gallons of oil, the heat is relatively evenly distributed, and because of the sheer amount of oil, the oil can effectively radiate that heat. If you were just submerging a laptop with its casing intact, the oil would fill the case, the heat from the components would transfer into the oil but have no way to escape efficiently, so it would continue to get hotter until the oil temperature equaled the temperatures of the compoenents, which would continue to get hotter until they burned out. Without adequate circulation, oil computers of any type, laptop or otherwise, are planned disasters.
Hope this offers some insight. If you have any questions, just write back to this board or direct any emails to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and I will help you out as best as I can. Oil PCs are great, I am typing this on one of mine right now....
in answer to the guy about putting your pc in a deepfreeze, you will have to let your pc warm up before it will work properly, if all the parts are cold they wont function right (your talking like -23 celcius) and if you acumulate frost on the parts, you will most likely destroy them when it melts, don't be a fool and ask retarded questions ok?
I'll keep you all posted tho.
Therefore, direct-immersion oil computers ist the best cooling method.
For best result use low-viscosity oil, it moves more easily by own convection. Do not use motoroil, it is too thick and not clean enough though it would work. Ask your utility for a liter or so transformer oil. It can be aggressive to your skin and eyes so be careful!
A friendlier choice is veg oil. The cheapest will do. It also is a good insulator. However, veg oils are not as stable as mineral oils. It is a good idea to change it after 6-12 months.
Dont put the computer into liquid CO2. It is so cold it can crack plastic parts and IC housing. And you definitely can't reach superconductivity, this occurs at -190 C or so and would destroy your circuitry.