Concept Isovect | Multi-part Cooling Device

[Isovect]

Hi all!

I've been working on this idea for a while now and I was hoping to see what people thought of it! It originally came to me after using motherboards with SSD slots behind the processor where the SSD would overheat and eventually have a shorter lifespan because of it. I've done some prototyping and all but I am just trying to test the waters to see if this is even something anybody would want.

Essentially this is a blower system to pressurise a small chamber which then forces high(er) pressure air through a tubing network and to specific components. I have found that many smaller components that have heatsinks but no fans (like SSDs, FPGAs, Tensor Units, etc) become thermal reservoirs rather than heat dissipation devices actually dramatically increasing the temperature of the device. Many devices that I see now have tiny fans on them which are most often overkill. If their fins had any airflow at all (as opposed to the stagnant air between large components and in odd spots) they would perform fine. With this device, one regular-sized driving fan would be able to cool many devices while remaining at a reasonable noise level at the expense of a little more space. Additionally, multiple blower ends could be designed for whatever specific component needs to be cooled and they would be relatively small and cheap and could even be 3d printed (Although with small components 3d printers may struggle). Most M.2 devices for example could use a universal blower end.

Please let me know what you all think, I look forward to any feedback! Please roast me if I have an awful idea. Have a great day!

 

[Isovect]

-

 

[BaK]

With this device, one regular-sized driving fan would be able to cool many devices while remaining at a reasonable noise level at the expense of a little more space.

Interesting idea!
Especially since I always try to avoid ITX motherboards coming with acting cooling on chipset / VRMs because of the noisy little fans.

Most drawback I see for our tiny system is that your system will need additional space as you say.
The bigger fan and the tubing needed to reach every component you want to cool down.


This makes me think of the opposite of what @petricor did for helping in cooling his PSU, the 'bleed air' technique:

Would your idea also work when pulling hot air from the components instead of blowing cool air at them?

If so, a mix of these two cooling solutions could let us use a fan already in the build, thus saving from adding a new dedicated one.
I guess an exhaust fan would be advised in order to remove the additional 'sucked' hot air from the case.

That will leave the tubing system to add.
What size of tubing are thinking at?

 

[Isovect]

Interesting idea!
Especially since I always try to avoid ITX motherboards coming with acting cooling on chipset / VRMs because of the noisy little fans.

Most drawback I see for our tiny system is that your system will need additional space as you say.
The bigger fan and the tubing needed to reach every component you want to cool down.


This makes me think of the opposite of what @petricor did for helping in cooling his PSU, the 'bleed air' technique:

Would your idea also work when pulling hot air from the components instead of blowing cool air at them?

If so, a mix of these two cooling solutions could let us use a fan already in the build, thus saving from adding a new dedicated one.
I guess an exhaust fan would be advised in order to remove the additional 'sucked' hot air from the case.

That will leave the tubing system to add.
What size of tubing are thinking at?

Yeah that is one of the issues that I specifically was trying to avoid. I see a LOT of people bad mouthing certain motherboards that have more features and advising people to go with lower end motherboards specifically because of "an annoying high pitch chipset fan"

The size certainly is a drawback and this would probably be for something slightly larger than a 5-7 liter case. The entire modules size could be greatly reduced but that comes at the expense of higher rpm and more turbulence which brings it back to annoying fan noise. I am not aware of any super quiet high pressure blower fans at the moment but if anyone knows of any that would be great.

The bleed air technique is certainly interesting and a way to solve the same issue of recycled hot air. I am not sure exactly how the air bleed system works but part of the reason that I chose to use a "blower" instead of a "sucker" is that I wanted to have net positive pressure inside of a case so the components that are passively cooled cool a bit better.

The pulling hot air method is a little bit problematic because it is a lot easier to guide a high pressure stream across a heatsink than to pull air across a heatsink (without having a shrouded sink). Additionally making an air sucking device is much harder with a blower fan than an axial fan and the axial fans I tested struggled to provide enough pressure.

The tubing I tested with was 13mm in diameter which is pretty small. The inner diameter was only 10mm but I found that using a thicker shell allowed for a much smaller bend radius before buckling.

Unfortunately I don't know if I could find enough demand for this part to continue developing it so I might have to call it quits unless a magical opportunity hits me in the head.

I also had another concept that I don't think has too much application to SFF but had great potential. It was a thin venting solution for CPU's or GPU's. I had seen a big uptick in people posting massive venting solutions in their computers with good results. I figured that was way too bulky to reasonably manufacture for such a variety of cases but if I could make the tubing way thinner people could use it. After a bunch of testing I figured that the cooling sucked with thin tubing was because of friction across the tube. If I could add a small fan to essentially negate the head loss from the longer, thin, higher air velocity tubing I could create an elegant cooling solution (not so elegant pictures attached with a dramatically long tube for testing). I tested it out and actually got really really good results (under stress it cooled as well as two 140mm with very little air recycling in an open chassis).


Unfortunately, similarly I don't know how I would connect to an audience with this product and I don't have any mentors at the moment that have experience in taking an idea all the way to sale and distribution. I can engineer a product but the more time I put into this the more I realized that I might not be able to do it alone and I didn't have enough resources under my belt yet to push it to completion.

Anyway, BaK, I really appreciated your insight into this and thank you so much for taking time to write such a thoughtful response. I wish you the best!