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Friday 29 February 2008, 5:09 PM
Stirling work for cooling your chips
Stirling engine design is one of those ideas that feels almost illicit - as a pal put it, "it's damned close to perpetual motion". But it isn't, of course; it relies on nothing more peculiar than the expansion and contraction of gases and the energy flow associated. Put a closed container of gas next to a heat source, and the gas will expand. Let it expand through some form of turbine, and you'll get rotational energy out of it. Then let it cool down, return it to the heat source and off you go again.
The last big attempt to commercialise Stirling engines was by Philips between the 30s and 50s, where devices powerful enough to drive valve wirelesses were built: you heated one bit up using what fuel you had to hand, and bingo, the Empire Service came crackling out of the aether. Those were a technical success but a commercial failure - at the same time as the various European empires were being wound down, thus removing the market of administrators stuck out in the boondocks, some annoying Americans invented the transistor and radios that ran forever on batteries.
So, top marks to MSI for reviving the idea and using it to cool processors - although here's hoping that we'll get chip design down to low enough powers that this Stirling engine too will not be needed.
PreviousComments on this post
Sterling idea!
Almost seems like it violates the laws of thermodynamics. The energy saving seems really minimal but the "impress your friends" value is priceless. The main thing for me is low fan noise, but thats a ball bearing mechanical issue.
Hopefully, it's a mute point as CPU's in the near future become more efficent.
The thing about the Stirling engine is that it is either simple, robust and inefficient (as in the Victorian engines that powered pumps and generators in the country) or efficient but unbelievably complex (as in the Philips quad mechanism which really blows your mind). The MSI engine might work because it doesn't need to be efficient, all it needs to do is extract a bit of heat from the processor to whirl a fan round. But the real advance might be the new Baxi domestic chp system that uses a gas-fired Stirling engine to generate electricity in the home, and provide hot water and central heating as a by-product. That could change power generation as we know it.
Combined heat and power is a fascinating area; it's been around for so long as an idea, with the numbers making sense, but so far has failed to take off. Digging around the area this weekend, I was intrigued to find out that in the 70s, during the last fuel crisis, Stirling-engined cars had been built and demonstrated (although the engine's inability to get going in a hurry didn't help here).
Tons of research has been done: perhaps now the economic environment will be conducive to getting some of that research into commercial production.
