“32% more performance”: Using a method that all people are familiar with, lithium salts can run your computer 32% faster and cooler.
According to researchers, the passive heat management technology is incredibly scalable and inexpensive.
According to research, adding salt to computer systems can increase performance by over 32% and stop them from overheating.
This passive method, which depends on moisture desorption from hygroscopic salt solutions, is hoped to be utilised in electronics, batteries, solar cells, and structures by a team from the City University of Hong Kong. When the relative humidity is at or below 75%, certain kinds of salt induce condensation of moisture.
The foundation of the system the researchers created is a permeable membrane positioned inside a framework that keeps the saltwater from coming into touch with any parts. To maintain low temperatures in, instance, CPUs, the water depends on evaporation and reabsorption. When tested using an ODROID-XU4 CPU, this resulted in a notable improvement in performance.
Utilising salt water to stay cool
According to Wei Wu, a professor in the Hong Kong university’s School of Energy and Environment, “poor thermal management can cause tremendous heat accumulation within electronic devices, resulting in the loss of functionality and, eventually, device failure.”
“We demonstrate that the proposed strategy is capable of offering a long-duration stable cooling capacity without solution leakage and corrosion, which can suppress the temperature rise of an emulated heater with a record-high cost effectiveness compared with state-of-the-art passive cooling strategies.”
To prevent devies from overheating, adding salt to water-based cooling systems might be a game-changer. In the future, we might see such technologies in the greatest workstations or servers, and maybe even in business laptops, if it is successfully scaled and commercialised.
A computer system’s performance was improved by more than 32% when lithium bromide-treated water was used in conjunction with the hygroscopic salt-loaded membrane-encapsulated needle heat sink (HSMNHS).
These kinds of salts have a significantly higher capacity to absorb moisture and can be recycled much more quickly than other cooling techniques that rely on hydrogels or metal frameworks. Wu added that there are very few technological obstacles in the way of making this a reality and that it is also far more affordable and scalable.
