A powerful way of cooling computer chip using liquid metal with low melting point as the cooling fluid

Abstract

With the improvement of computational speed, thermal management becomes a serious concern in computer system. CPU chips are squeezing into tighter and tighter spaces with no more room for heat to escape. Total power-dissipation levels now reside about 110 W, and peak power densities are reaching 400–500 W/mm2 and are still steadily climbing. As a result, higher performance and greater reliability are extremely tough to attain. But since the standard conduction and forced-air convection techniques no longer be able to provide adequate cooling for sophisticated electronic systems, new solutions are being looked into liquid cooling, thermoelectric cooling, heat pipes, and vapor chambers. In this paper, we investigated a novel method to significantly lower the chip temperature using liquid metal with low melting point as the cooling fluid. The liquid gallium was particularly adopted to test the feasibility of this cooling approach, due to its low melting point at 29.7 °C, high thermal conductivity and heat capacity. A series of experiments with different flow rates and heat dissipation rates were performed. The cooling capacity and reliability of the liquid metal were compared with that of the water-cooling and very attractive results were obtained. Finally, a general criterion was introduced to evaluate the cooling performance difference between the liquid metal cooling and the water-cooling. The results indicate that the temperature of the computer chip can be significantly reduced with the increasing flow rate of liquid gallium, which suggests that an even higher power dissipation density can be achieved with a large flow of liquid gallium and large area of heat dissipation. The concept discussed in this paper is expected to provide a powerful cooling strategy for the notebook PC, desktop PC and large computer. It can also be extended to more wide area involved with thermal management on high heat generation rate.