[Alchemy]

Originally posted by FishaOfMen
I've decided that for the winter I'm going to take on the project of LN2 and dry ice cooling. I'm thinking over the design of a container for this stuff and was hoping to get some help from those more knowledgeable in heat transfer.

Just to get this out of the way, you understand this is an extremely expensive and extremely short-term cooling solution, yes?

What's already out there: I've seen some of the containers used by the likes of Macci, sysfailur, and the Japanese guys. The containers end up being simply that: containers.

What else would you keep the LN2 in, if not a container?

It seems that none of the lessons we've learned in heat transfer have been applied - no heatsinks and no turbulence but that caused by the violent reaction of the dry ice or LN2 encountering heat.

Your plan is to put the LN2 directly in contact with your board, or on a heatsink directly in contact with your CPU?

If so, the "violent reaction of the LN2 encountering heat" (??) is the LN2 *boiling* as it comes in contact with a solid. A boiling liquid applied to a solid has a heat transfer coefficient several degrees of magnitude above what you can possibly achieve by manually creating turbulence in a one-phase fluid. It's like trying to soup up a Viper by sticking a model plane engine on the front to pull it - the improvement is staggeringly pointless.

What I'm thinking about:[list=1][*]Taking my Alpha PAL8045 or Thermalright SLK-800 and welding copper walls around the edges. The only problem here is that with dry ice, it will displace the dry ice chunks a good distance from the CPU core. I'm not sure if there would be any drawbacks with LN2.

Aside from the fact that you'll probably destroy the core instantly by tempering it improperly when you add the LN2, will most certainly spill it if you're trying to get it into a container that small, and have a better-than-average chance of losing your hands and eyes when the LN2 flash-boils and blasts a 9" column of liquid at your face, and a decent chance of dying an unspeakably painful death when you accidently inhale or ingest the LN2 spraying at you, then no, no drawbacks at all.

Let me know what you think.

I think you don't know what you're doing and would maim or kill yourself if you ever tried this.

Alchemy