Fujitsu develops thin cooling device for compact electronics

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Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd has announced the development of the world’s first thin cooling device designed for small, thin electronic devices.

Smartphones, tablets, and other similar mobile devices are increasingly multifunctional and fast. These spec improvements, however, have increased heat generated from internal components, and the overheating of localized parts in devices has become problematic. Fujitsu has developed a thin loop heat pipe, less than one millimeter thick, to solve this problem. This new device was developed using technologies for stacking metal sheets. It is capable of transferring approximately five times more heat than current thin heat pipes.

Background

For mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers, communications and data-processing speeds have accelerated, multi-functionality, such as with cameras, has advanced, and the devices themselves are becoming smaller and slimmer. The increased functions and decreased size of these devices has led to extremely dense packages, where the heat generated by each square unit has increased. Heat generated within the device can also raise surface temperature. In order to provide customers with a more comfortable mobile device, it is necessary to reduce concentrations of heat within devices.

Technological Issues

With portable devices that cannot accommodate blower fans or water-cooling pumps, the conventional approach has been to install sheets of metal or graphite with relatively high thermal conductivity to transfer heat away from heat-generating components, thereby avoiding internal hot-spots. With increased amounts of generated heat, however, the thermal conductive properties of these materials alone are no longer sufficient in transferring heat.

About the Technology

Fujitsu has developed the world’s first loop heat pipe less than 1 millimeter thick that can be added to small, thin electronics.

A loop heat pipe is a heat-transfer device that consists of an evaporator that absorbs heat from the heat source and a condenser that dissipates that heat away, with the two components connected by pipes into a loop. A working fluid is encapsulated inside this closed loop as a coolant. The heat from the heat source evaporates the coolant, and the energy that goes into evaporating the coolant is taken away from the heat source, lowering its temperature. It is based off of the same principle used when sprinkling water on pavement to reduce heat.

The thin loop heat pipe that Fujitsu has developed can be installed on a heat-generating component, such as a CPU, in an electronic device so that the heat generated by the component is carried to a relatively cool spot inside the device to diffuse the heat.