[jungle]

Ok, i have no idea if a lot of yall have masters, doctorates, or just a lot of experience in the field of heat dissipation, but i was talking to my grandad the other day, who did his masters in thermodynamics and heat transfer before going on to get a doctorate in chem.e. anyway, he's extremely smart, but also very stubborn, so there's a chance that what he said could be improved upon.

basically, he said that the best heatsink would be a copper block with many small diameter holes drilled straight through it, no maze or anything. as long as the block had a high flow, this would be ideal. the problem, he mentioned, was that you would have to have a pump that could put up enough pressure to maintain a decent flow through a pretty resistive block. the way i look at it, the fairly recent jet impingment movement is very similar to this idea in many respects. now before you jump all over that statment, it obviously is quite different. but i've noticed a trend, i believe, in waterblock construction that might suggest that he could indeed be correct.

start off with the early waterblocks (the ones i know about anyway), say the early dd mazes and d-tek tc-4. these were basically large diameter holes drilled in a switching patter through a block. a big step came from the white water, which utilized micro-channels (if i'm not mistaken), which is closer to the small diameter many hole approach. huge gains in performance. then the cascade/ storm, which both apparently use the jet in cup method.

from what i can reason, the main difference between this jet-cup method and the straight through hole method is turbulence. also, the actual contact area of the heatsink (since the jets are not conductors of heat) is the cup area, as opposed to the much longer contact area of the drilled hole. i realize that turbulence is a great promotor of cooling because more water comes in contact with the actual heatsink. however, when i think about it, it seems like this turbulence would be simliar to the added surface area of the straight through hole. granted, the turbulence could bring more water in contact with the heatsink, but i think that the straight through block could rival that with increased flow and increased surface area of the block.

one more thing, my grandad explained to me that (in a tube at least) there is a layer of water all around the circumference of the tube that is essentially unmoving, and therefore insulating. increasing the flow rate decreased the thickness of this layer of stagnate water, so increasing performance two fold. it could make sense to me that such a condition might exist in the bottom of the cups of the cascade etc., in which case, perhaps it would be beneficial to attempt to put a small cone inside the cup. anyway that is just my random thought and purely unfounded.

i really hope that i haven't offended anyone with this post. i have the utmost respect for everyone that has put so much effort into such an interesting area. please do not think that i think i know more than you or anything like that. my mind just came up with the idea that, as we improve designs more and more, we are actually coming nearer to this idea that my grandad told me about. is it possible that something so simple could be the way to go? maybe something like this could be improved with turbulence or something like that. or maybe this could be an easy diy job that wouldnt require much heavy machinery that could perform somewhere around the level of the top-end waterblocks, if perhaps actually not as well. what he said just threw me for a loop and i thought i would share it here and see what the other experts thought. eagerly await opinions.

jungle