Alternatives to water as a coolant?

[wmandra]

Hey all, I was just bored and started googling "heat transfer fluids" and got a ton of results, which made me curious, Are any of the synthetic industrial type fluids better for liquid cooling rather than water?? Of course, I realize that even if one of these fluids is better it would most likely cost way too much to warrent putting it into a PCs cooling loop, but it still makes you wonder if water is the best liguid for heat transfer then why do these companies offer up synthetics??

Bill

[Belenar]

My guess would be that in some applications other caracteristics are required
- higher/lower viscosity
- higher/lower boiling point
- higher/lower melting point
- reactivity with other materials (corrosion, ...)
- ....

There are more factors to a coolant than just the specific heat capacity (J / kg * K).
But for PC cooling applications (not taking sub-zero cooling into account) water's melting & boiling point aren't a problem, it has a low viscosity and the specific heat capacity is very high.
If you take the cost of distilled water into account, i guess it will be real hard to find a better coolant than water for 'our' application.

[scotty6435]

florinert is a coolent fluid that can be used in PC systems. By all accounts it is SLIGHTLY worse at cooling than water however it's unreactive, doesn't need changing, low surface tension and does not support algae/bacterial growth. The only problem with it is that it's toxic at 200*C (if pump fails) and costs £50 per 500ml!!