Liquid Mercury cooling?

[H0R53]

I just watched a video on fan cooling vs AiO coolers (SalzaarStudio), and thought it was interesting, made a few points but didn't overall like the video because it was boring.

 

Anyway, he talks about the thermal conductivity of water and copper, etc. Mercury is a liquid at room temperature and is also a metal. I thought about gallium but that has too high of a melting temperature. Aside from its obvious toxicity would a liquid mercury loop be decent for cooling or is it just not worth the trouble? Not that I plan to ever do this but I would be interested in the results.

[The Sloth]

not worth it

[xentropa]

It's surface tension is too high.  Probably difficult to get it to flow between thin copper heat sink fins.

[whoisit1118]

Typical aluminum and copper fins will not work, because mercury will form amalgam with them..

[whiteGloveReview]

1 minute ago, H0R53 said:

I just watched a video on fan cooling vs AiO coolers (SalzaarStudio), and thought it was interesting, made a few points but didn't overall like the video because it was boring.

 

Anyway, he talks about the thermal conductivity of water and copper, etc. Mercury is a liquid at room temperature and is also a metal. I thought about gallium but that has too high of a melting temperature. Aside from its obvious toxicity would a liquid mercury loop be decent for cooling or is it just not worth the trouble? Not that I plan to ever do this but I would be interested in the results.

only thing I could see that's frighteningly about trying gallium is that it has a bad habit of making other metals (namely aluminum) REALLY BRITTLE (vis a vis), I don't know about mercury but it's tremendously heavy so it'd take a lot of power to get it to move through a loop, that and it has a really high surface tension so it may or may not even go through heatsinks. 

[Damascus]

6 minutes ago, H0R53 said:

Aside from its obvious toxicity

Thats an interesting point lol. even the hardline loops are  porous enough to lose gas, it would be like standing next to a mercury diffuser.

 

Probably about as useful as mineral oil

[W-L]

3 minutes ago, H0R53 said:

I just watched a video on fan cooling vs AiO coolers (SalzaarStudio), and thought it was interesting, made a few points but didn't overall like the video because it was boring.

 

Anyway, he talks about the thermal conductivity of water and copper, etc. Mercury is a liquid at room temperature and is also a metal. I thought about gallium but that has too high of a melting temperature. Aside from its obvious toxicity would a liquid mercury loop be decent for cooling or is it just not worth the trouble? Not that I plan to ever do this but I would be interested in the results.

Sapphire a while back did that as an experiment I believe it was way too costly as the liquid gallium was not cheap.

http://www.frostytech.com/permalinkArch.cfm?NewsID=59728

 

There was also a thread on the forums of a potential liquid metal build but I don't think it got any further due to the cost of pumps and the liquid gallium/mercury mix itself.

 

[Phentos]

Mercury is far too heavy, its surface tension is very high, and it will form an amalgam with most metals, thereby compromising their structural integrity. I'm not sure if copper will do this with mercury, but aluminum definitely will. 

 

A piece of aluminum that has formed an amalgam with mercury will literally have the structural integrity of a snack cracker.

[H0R53]

2 minutes ago, W-L said:

Sapphire a while back did that as an experiment I believe it was way too costly as the liquid gallium was not cheap.

http://www.frostytech.com/permalinkArch.cfm?NewsID=59728

 

There was also a thread on the forums of a potential liquid metal build but I don't think it got any further due to the cost of pumps and the liquid gallium/mercury mix itself.

 

Interesting, I'll check those out.

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

me find video

mercury eats metals. its how they extract gold from dirt