Crazy cooler prototype - NO pump!

[kenblu24]

 

Guess the liquid!

Hints: It's not 3M Novec 7100 Engineered Fluid. According to Roman, he wants something with a different boiling point, for more headroom when overclocking. Also, according to Ben Tec (YT) Novec can't be sold to consumers. Since he can't sell a Novec-filled product to people, he found a different fluid.

 

[kenblu24]

Kung Fury (YT) mentions 3M also has its Fluorinert line of liquids, and there are other companies that have two-phase liquids for this application: Engineered Fluids and Cargille-Labs

[darknessblade]

here is a list of common liquids
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/boiling-points-fluids-gases-d_155.html

since linus did not say any CPU temperatures, we cannot guess the liquid's temperature
thus its boiling point.

 

since we do not have this piece of crucial information we cannot guess the liquid

[Lathlaer]

On 10.06.2018 at 5:44 AM, kenblu24 said:

Also, according to Ben Tec (YT) Novec can't be sold to consumers

This is true. Even if you visit the Casekings.de website where der8auer sells his builds, you can see that they sell the Aqua Exhalare only to enterprise customers.

[Pip313]

Temperatures are irrelevant also. It’s under pressure which throws BP off. 

[DTX]

If he is being so secretive, I'm confident it is Hexane(s) or a variant(Low BP hydrocarbon) from working with it for years.

Hexane is clear, has a boiling point right at 69C which is about as hot as you'd want the CPU to run, at which time evaporation will remove huge amounts of heat, it is non-polar, cheap, easily available, largely unreactive, I've spilled a ton on my hands and it just slightly dries them so it's relatively safe, it can condense at close to room temperatures and it won't light on fire unless you reach 234C or expose it with a spark or flame at which point your other components are likely to be on fire.

Spoiler

In the lab, I would evaporate Hexane on a ceramic hotplate set at 500C with a metal pot on it filled with 1 cm of water, 50 mL of hexane would take about 15-20 minutes to completely evaporate inside a 250 mL glass beaker placed into the boiling water under light vacuum from a chemical exhaust hood. Ignoring any additional heat from the metal pot into the glass it's in contact with, the glass was being heated by boiling water (100C) and the very hot to the touch beaker would still get hexane vapor condensing on the hot beaker walls as it boiled (The air can only hold so much hexane gas molecules so it is forced out of the gas phase, kind of why you cannot drown in 100% humidity weather because that isn't the same as 100% water). By cooling the gas with the radiator and pushing equilibrium towards the liquid phase by saturating the system with the gas form, it is possible.

It's not that complicated if you look into chemical distillation loops (At least the classical examples, yt doesn't return anything useful when you search). As long as they are no leaks, the system is closed and none of the hardware gets dissolved by the Hexane (soft plastic is a concern although anything teflon coated like magnetic stir bars will survive). The hot gas will naturally rise away from hot cpu, through the pipe into the radiator, once there it should condense at radiator into a liquid and the liquid will both fall from gravity and be forced down the other side mostly from the change in volume from hexane turning from liquid to gas.

If LTT ever runs out of ideas, I would like for them to attempt hexane cpu cooling with a cheap board/cpu as a proof of concept provided they can assemble everything without getting hurt. I saw how their homemade heatsinks turned out so I'm not holding my breath but I don't even think you would need to sink the entire cpu into the hexane if they can transfer the heat with a piece of metal into the boiling reservoir in front of the cpu. Plexiglass has excellent resistance to Hexane, even at higher temperatures provided joints can be sealed. Glass would be more thermally conductive and there are lots of chemical glassware available. If the room itself is AC to a comfortable temp and performance is good, this heatsink could be passively cooled into the room without the need for heatsink fans. I am willing to work into a better design schematic if LTT is serious about building my heatsink. Just giving credit is fine, if this works it'll just get a smile out of it and people a cool video.

Useful links:

http://www.eplastics.com/Plastic/plastics_library/Chemical-Resistance-of-Plexiglass-Acrylic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eIc_v-SrI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiYrsJOyt2Y