Chuckumentary // CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Engineers at Fujitsu have come up with a way of dissipating heat from mobile devices five times faster than current methods -- by using liquid cooling.

Many manufacturers wrestle with the problems of getting rid of heat from increasingly powerful chips in phones and tablets. Unless that heat is removed, dangerous hotspots can form when devices are in use, causing internal damage.


One common solution is to make large parts of devices out of substances with high heat conductivity such as metal or graphite, which spread the energy over a wider area. But Fujitsu thinks it has a better idea.

It's built a microscale heat pipe, less than a millimetre thick, designed specifically for small, thin electronics. It's comprised of two parts -- the first is an evaporator that absorbs heat from a heat source and the second is a condenser that dissipates the heat away, with the two parts connected by pipes. Here's what it looks like:

Fujitsu

It's the same principle used by mammals to maintain body temperature. Sweat cools the surface of the skin when it evaporates, taking heat away from the body. Fridges work on a similar, albeit more complex, principle involving changes in pressure too.


Fujitsu's other neat trick was to use capillary action to drive flow. That's the same process that plants use to send water to their upper leaves against the pull of gravity by taking advantage of surface tension and adhesive forces. Inside Fujitsu's device, the tubes are filled with pores that are just the right size to get fluid to circulate. "Compared to the previous thin heat pipes and material of highly thermal conductive sheets, this new device allows for approximately five times greater heat transfer," says Fujitsu. "This new technology will allow CPUs and other parts to function at low temperatures while preventing heat concentration within localised areas, thus introducing new possibilities for cooling small electronic devices."

The technology should make its way into smartphones around 2017.

Fujitsu adds that it's also looking into potential applications in communications infrastructure, medical equipment, and wearable devices.