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Unread 11-20-2003, 07:48 AM   #42
Ewan
Cooling Neophyte
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Sweden
Posts: 30
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Another question. Would it be accurate in saying the most amount of pressure in the system is right out of the outlet of the pump?

If so, would it not give you a small advantage with center inlet blocks to go from the pump directly to the block? Instead of having the pressure drop from the rad first then the block?
Just for accuracy one may wish to remember that the head of water adds to the absolute pressure at any given point. Therefore in addition to the pump's pressure there is pressure at the bottom of the loop which is equal to the height of the loop. So if the waterblock is mounted 20 cm above the pump, then the absolute pressure will be 20cm of water less than the pump outlet pressure. This information is completely useless though because the absolute pressure of any particular point in the loop is irrelevant. If you wished to raise the pressure of your system you could hook up a T connector to your water cooling loop and plug that into your water mains which will be anywhere between 2- 6 bar. However flowrate will remain the same since the pressure drop through the loop will remain unchanged. Thge high pressure will stress all your components though, so don't do this.

One could assume that having a higher pressure would mean a greater contact force against heat transfer surfaces which would be beneficial in much in the same way that heat will transfer better between a CPU and water block the harder you clamp them together. But it doesn't work this way.
When you increase force between two solids you are in effect increasing the contact surface area, since irregularities between the surfaces get squashed out. While the materials seem hard, on a molecular scale they will get better squashed together the harder you squeeze them. This squashing together means that more mocules from one surface will come into contact with molecules from the other, thereby increasing the heat transfer surface area.
This doesn't happen to the same extent with liquids since liquids find their way into gaps anyway. Increasing the pressure may help them into very tight gaps, but it's not an effect which I think would be noticable unless you had extremely high pressures. If you had pressures of 50 bar or thereabouts then the effect may be noticable but that's a far stretch from the 1.1 bar that one would find in a watercooling situation (1 bar being atmospheric pressure and the 0.1 bar provided by the pump).
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