For large-scale manufacturing technologies and equipment, heat exchangers have long been highly recognizable as an efficient and effective thermal management solution. Keeping such equipment properly cooled once took more cumbersome solutions, such as air conditioners. However, the significant energy and cost-savings heat exchangers provide proved invaluable to streamlining companies’ electrical cooling processes. Today, the same principles that made heat exchangers so valuable to larger equipment also make them highly beneficial for smaller, more powerful, and more advanced computing technologies.
Keeping high-performance technology cooled
Electrical waste heat behaves the same in most applications, regardless of their size. The electrical components that are housed within enclosures give off waste heat as they operate, and this heat can accumulate into pockets if allowed to. Heat pockets damage sensitive electrical components, causing them to overheat and malfunction, or cease to function entirely. Higher-performance technologies require more efficient methods of dealing with waste heat to prevent this overheating, and heat exchangers often provide the optimal method for doing so. Rather than trying to chill the waste heat using cold air, a heat exchanger uses an eco-friendly cooling fluid to absorb the heat and transfer it somewhere safely away from sensitive components.
Heat transfer and phase-change cooling
The process of using a cooling fluid to absorb and transfer waste heat is a principle of electrical cooling that has long been central to advanced computing. However, the concept of liquid cooling has traditionally been an expensive one to implement, requiring custom-designed and crafted cooling apparatus for every application. One of heat exchangers’ greatest benefits is their ability to streamline liquid cooling with the help of a process known as phase-change cooling. A heat exchanger takes advantage of its fluid’s latent heat of vaporization, or the point at which it evaporates, to make the heat transfer process much more efficient.
Benefits of using heat exchangers for advanced computers
In a modern heat exchanger, phase-change cooling allows for the cooling fluid to rapidly absorb waste heat up to the point it evaporates, before there’s any rise in the surrounding temperature. The heated, less dense fluid can more easily transfer the heat that it has absorbed thanks to gravity and natural forces such as convection. Once it’s safely away from sensitive electrical components, it can release the heat and condense back into a liquid, circulating back to the heat source to continue the heat transfer cycle.
For more information about how heat exchangers make liquid cooling easy for computers, call Noren Thermal Solutions in Taylor, TX, at 866-936-6736.