Could the human body "water" cool a pc hypothetically?

[Louiespitfire]

*I don't know whether this belongs on the cooling section or not because its not a serious question 

 

So I was thinking that the human body if you think about it is just a glorified water loop with the heart/pulses being the pumps and veins being the loop, so I was wondering if hypothetically if someone was to hold there hands against a cpu with thermal paste applied imbeetween would it cool a pc, obviously ignoring burn pains and the obvious ethical issues would it cool a pc or atleast keep it in usable range before the system restarts, disregarding thermal throttling

 

[Fasauceome]

as the skin burns I think a callous would form and the skin would thicken, reducing thermal transfer. Kind of morbid, don't go cooking someone's skin for your PC!

but maybe it will smell like bacon...

[mapegl]

Also, you don't want certain proteins in our body to reach 42 or above (I think....that was the temperature). I don't know too much about this, but this is basically why high fevers are so dangerous. 

It is kinda like cooking an egg in your blood (super oversimplified) and now you have chunks floating in your veins that eventually will cause a stroke or something along those lines. 

[TetraSky]

If it's holding the cpu's IHS's you'd get burns. You skin doesn't conduct heat as well as you think.

Plus, you can 100% boot a PC without a heatsink just to see if it works, no need to hold the IHS to "dissipate" the heat...

 

And if we're hooking a human to a watercooling loop... Well, for one thing, the human would die (no water, just blood from your own body going through the loop).

Bodies are regulated at very precises temperatures, plugging yourself up to a loop is just asking to get that blood temperature in the 40+ and then you're pretty much fcked. This is not even including the small molecules of junk that may be in the loop that's not floating in your bloodstream.

 

But technically, the heart, as a muscle, could work as a pump, yes. But... Not that good of a pump. Since it's more of a dosing/metering pump (at set intervals) and not a pump that's constantly pumping away at a quick pace like a centrifugal one. 

[Heliian]

No, you should take a biology class.

 

However, if your hand was made of copper and your veins were at least 5/16" id and your heart was an impeller capable of continuous flow and your body was made of cooling fins then it would be possible. 

[Mojo-Jojo]

I like this question, as it actually makes a bit of sense.

 

The body is able to produce and dissipate a huge amount of heat. For example, when you go for a run, in 1 hour you'll burn almost 1000 kcal. 1 kcal equals 1.16 Wh. So that means in 1 hour you generate over 1 KWh of heat, for an average power of over 1 kW. That's more than two 3090 TIs. Or about the same heat as a space heater. And your body can maintain its temperature during all of that.

 

The problem then with your suggested application, is that this power is not concentrated in one part of your body. Your legs are working, your heart is pumping, your core is being exercised. Your body is quite efficient at removing internal heat, because it's the internal temperature it has to regulate. Putting hundreds of watts on your skin would insulate this heat from your internal organs, and instead of being transferred and dissipated, it would just burn your skin.

[AnonymousGuy]

I don't think you could.  To transfer the heat from a PC into your body you'd also be decreasing the surface area available to dissipate the heat.  Think: getting into a bath-tub and having the water circulate in a watercooling loop.  My instinct is telling me the water would keep getting hotter and hotter and your head alone wouldn't be able to sweat enough to compete.  I'm sure someone has made a surface area evaporation vs. heat load calculator but I don't have time to look at it.

 

It'd be a mildly entertaining LTT video idea but I suspect you'd need a very low power build that would effectively be better off passively cooled anyways.

[Ralphred]

17 minutes ago, Mojo-Jojo said:

So that means in 1 hour you generate over 1 KWh of heat

Nah, you generate over 1 KWh of energy. A good rule of thumb is jumping as high as you can uses about 750 watts of power during the jump part. But there is an easier way of looking at it. The "average" heart can move about 5 litres a minute, if we assume ~ 4200J/L/°C and only allow for a 1°C rise in temperature (something that can easily be dissipated by a human) we end up with 21000J/Min or 350J/s (watts), so anything under a 350w TDP would be fine (using the 1°C rise as a model). If you look at the surface area of your skin, and add sweating to the mix, you can dissipate a lot of heat, in fact the "average" person in modern clothing inside a house at 20°C emits about 100w of heat just by existing.

But beyond that, if we can just assume an 80kg person, heating that by 1 degree would take a 350w TDP processor 16 minutes, so even without dissipation, you could mine monero for ~25% of the time
 

[dilpickle]

1 hour ago, Louiespitfire said:

*I don't know whether this belongs on the cooling section or not because its not a serious question 

 

So I was thinking that the human body if you think about it is just a glorified water loop with the heart/pulses being the pumps and veins being the loop, so I was wondering if hypothetically if someone was to hold there hands against a cpu with thermal paste applied imbeetween would it cool a pc, obviously ignoring burn pains and the obvious ethical issues would it cool a pc or atleast keep it in usable range before the system restarts, disregarding thermal throttling

 

That part turns a silly question into complete nonsense. That's not how skin works.

 

If you want to even remotely discuss this you should talk about maybe hooking a waterblock tube into your veins.

[danomicar]

Oh looky here, man-made (hypothetical) horrors beyond my comprehension.

[tkitch]

I /have/ burned a print of a CPU onto my finger before.

No you're not watercooling with a human body.

[lewdicrous]

Your skin will not be able to withstand those temperatures. Your body won't be able to dissipate the added heat effectively.

 

Messing with your internal temperature will not end well. Not to mention the damage to the skin and the underlying tissue.

[Needfuldoer]

How could grabbing a piece of metal that's almost hot enough to boil water at sea level possibly go wrong?

 

(Many ways. Don't do something that boneheaded.)

[SkenderTV]

On 5/31/2022 at 3:44 PM, Louiespitfire said:

*I don't know whether this belongs on the cooling section or not because its not a serious question 

 

So I was thinking that the human body if you think about it is just a glorified water loop with the heart/pulses being the pumps and veins being the loop, so I was wondering if hypothetically if someone was to hold there hands against a cpu with thermal paste applied imbeetween would it cool a pc, obviously ignoring burn pains and the obvious ethical issues would it cool a pc or atleast keep it in usable range before the system restarts, disregarding thermal throttling

 

The body is above ambient, so would perform worse than an air cooler. 

[IkeaGnome]

On 5/31/2022 at 7:17 PM, danomicar said:

Oh looky here, man-made (hypothetical) horrors beyond my comprehension.

Coming in 2030. The Razer HumanCentiCooler. Now with integrated RGB!

[cmndr]

3 hours ago, SkenderTV said:

The body is above ambient, so would perform worse than an air cooler. 

Probably not the best calculation set to use.
Sure, the human body is around 10C above "room temperature" but the inside of a computer case is often hotter than that still.
Even then the fact that a computer part would "stabilize" well over 100C with no temperature controls means that there's still a sufficient temperature gradient means that thermal capacity and conductivity would dominate.

There's a bunch of other reasons why dumping 200-1000W of heat into a human body, that normally dissipates 100W, is a bad idea though. Like death.

[danomicar]

20 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

Coming in 2030. The Razer HumanCentiCooler. Now with integrated RGB!

"Reduce your carbon footprint and save on your food bill by warming your body with SkinHeat by Meta. Now with blood tracking technology!"

[LogicalDrm]

I see you skipped biology and physics. Human temperature is 35-40C. Skin is used as passive cooling surface and is bit cooler. CPU, after being actively cooled with massive heatsink and fan, is already double that under the load. So no, using human body as passive cooling loop would not work at all.

[For Science!]

The closest thing would probably be bong-cooling a PC which is more or less cooling the PC by sweating.

[SkenderTV]

On 6/2/2022 at 9:22 PM, cmndr said:

Probably not the best calculation set to use.
Sure, the human body is around 10C above "room temperature" but the inside of a computer case is often hotter than that still.
Even then the fact that a computer part would "stabilize" well over 100C with no temperature controls means that there's still a sufficient temperature gradient means that thermal capacity and conductivity would dominate.

There's a bunch of other reasons why dumping 200-1000W of heat into a human body, that normally dissipates 100W, is a bad idea though. Like death.

As compared to drawing ambient air across a aluminum heatsink?

[cmndr]

3 hours ago, SkenderTV said:

As compared to drawing ambient air across a aluminum heatsink?

If you get enough airflow, the temperature delta matters less than you think.

The general formula for heat transfer is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_cooling

heat transfer ~ (coefficient of heat transfer) * (temp of object - temp of environment)

If you 2x the airflow you'd basically double the coefficient of heat transfer (at a molecular level you can think of it as how quickly passing by atoms absorb the kinetic energy of atoms in the object being cooled, so if you 2x the atoms making contact, BAM improvement; yes there's friction involved but it's so small an issue it's removed from the formula).

A heatsink with a fan on it would get a lot more airflow than a human body (that's already 32C) and this might make up for the fact that a computer case is 40C.

Keep in mind the "baseline" temperature for a processor is something like 100C or higher. The delta is 60+

 

Full disclosure, it's been... 10 years since I took a course on partial differential equations.

[Vishera]

On 5/31/2022 at 9:44 PM, Louiespitfire said:

obviously ignoring burn pains and the obvious ethical issues would it cool a pc or atleast keep it in usable range before the system restarts, disregarding thermal throttling

That's torture... of humans and machines alike.

Both the human and the CPU will die since you are ignoring the mechanisms that protect them from high temperatures,

[Vishera]

On 6/6/2022 at 1:54 PM, For Science! said:

The closest thing would probably be bong-cooling a PC which is more or less cooling the PC by sweating.

Sweat can solidify and create a blockage.