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Unread 06-19-2007, 11:46 AM   #10
bobo5195
Cooling Savant
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: uk
Posts: 400
Default Re: Discussion of heatsink designs

It was a bit of a bullpoop argument thinking on it but this is what i meant....

It a heat transfer effect not a maths weirdity.
I never really heard of the concept of fourier time outside of my lecture notes as well, so it might be called something else. My lecturer was a don of heat transfer but he used weird words.

Fourier time is the amount of time it takes heat to reach one location from another. E.g. i warm a bar one end how long does it take to reach the other. Applied to steady state theory if i apply a pulse (like a hot bit of processor warming up) whats the mean time for me to see an output of that pulse at the end. Its going to be governed by the bodies thermal mass and its conductivity.

In the case of a solid bit of copper its a diffusive process wasily workable (if like abit of maths and simplifying assumptions) from basic laws. In heat pipes you are dealing with a much slower mass transfer process.

Its introducing dynamic process into the mix (just to make the question harder). I'm unsure that it is really the case as the heat is going to quite rapidly diffuse. A little thought experiment proves that it is quite a weird problem that isn't really going to come up alot.
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