The Scythe NCU-2000 looks like some massive industrial cooler plucked out of a radar system, but
is actually built around some pretty common cooling technologies we've seen before in
PC's.
Essentially, a 5mm thick copper
baseplate is bolted to the bottom of an Akachi heatpipe whose
only purpose is to absorb heat from the CPU and transfer it to a multitude of aluminum
fins over its "U" shaped race track of about 385mm in length. The Akachi heatpipe,
or Heatlane heatpipe as it maker, TS Heatronics, calls
it, increases the total cooling surface area with the aide of dozens of
aluminum cooling fins.
Traditional vs Akachi
Heatpipes
Traditional heatpipes are really neat devices; as heat energy
enters into the pipe, water under a vacuum inside the tube is converted into vapour (water
boils at a lower temperature when there is less atmospheric pressure). That
water vapour is used to transfer the heat it has absorbed to the other
end of the heatpipe. As the vapour reaches the colder side of the tube
it condenses, and returns back to liquid
form. As it does so, the energy which caused the water to turn to vapour is dumped
into the surrounding metal of the heatpipe, which impart transfers it to cooling
fins. A physical property know as capillary action then takes hold and draws the
freshly condensed liquid back along an internal wick structure to the hot side of the
heatpipe where the entire process repeats.
What goes on inside the Akachi
heatpipe is similar to this process, but the technology has a few distinct differences. First of all,
where a standard copper heatpipe uses water as a working fluid, this Akachi pipe
uses a slightly more exotic chemical; hydroflurocarbon-134a (HFC-134A). The manufacturer has
included a full page of warnings about the proper use of the NCU-2000 with
regards to the HFC-130a, and we recommend you read through them at least once so
you don't accidentally maim
yourself.
The
HFC-130a working fluid, once heated, circulates through a
"meandering capillary tube" that is formed from about 30 individual 1mm x 1mm
channels within the 2mm thick x 60mm wide extruded aluminum pipe structure. If
you're a little unsure of what that describes, just look at the edge of a
corrugated cardboard box where you see all those little folds, and visualize
pretty much the same thing in aluminum.
 |
| If the side of the
NCU-2000's Heatlane pipe reminds you a little bit of corrugated cardboard
you're not that far off. While it seems as though it's a solid stip of
aluminum, it is actually composed of 30-40 very tiny pipes joined side-to-side. You can
see the outlines of these pipes in the picture above, taken of
the NCU-1000. |
Invented by Hisateru Akachi
who called the technology "self-excited oscillation heatpipe", the Akachi pipe
works something like this...
(Note: The English documentation is a bit vague, so we may be off on some
of the finer points of the technology.)
The working fluid is loaded
into the tiny 1mm x 1mm sized capillaries of the pipe under pressure, and with
small pockets of a gas every so often. As an area of the flat Heatlane pipe is
heated, the working fluid in those pipes directly behind the heatsource (in our
case the entire width of the pipe, or 30-40 individual pipes) expands slightly
as it transforms to heat-carrying vapour.
That expansion of the working
fluid into a vapour, into the small microvoids, drives all of the fluid and
vapour in the entire system to move forward/backward (oscillate) at a certain
velocity.
All the little pipes in the
entire Heatlane heatpipe are connected, so whatever happens at one point drives
everything else - kind of like slurping soda through a curly straw with a bunch
of trapped air bubbles... The oscillating motion transfers the heated vapour to
a cooler area of the Heatlane pipe where the latent heat is then transferred to
the surrounding cool metal structure. The cooled vapour then condenses back to a
working fluid, and the process continues on ad infinitum as long as the heating
and cooling conditions are maintained.
TS Heatronics have a quick video of the process in motion on this page,
taken with an X-ray machine
so you can actually see the little vapour bubbles and working fluid racing
through the aluminum Heatlane pipes.
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