Keeping Kit Kool

[pete_l]

There was an article on Slashdot recently about a brand new form of CPU heatsink.

Briefly, the heatsink material is a sort of copper "sponge" (as in bath, not cake) that is both very efficient at removing heat and also lightweight and has no moving parts.

This is what the maker's protoype, passively cooled PC looks like:

It occurs to me, that as well as removing heat from a CPU, it could also be used to inject "cold" from a Peltier into, say, a CCD or DSLR.

Without knowing the price of the material, it might be possible to either wrap your camera in this stuff and use a Peltier to cool it all down, or to fill the insides of a CCD with this (taking care to insulate tje electronics from the conductive copper mesh) to remove CCD heat more efficiently that just through convection.

One to keep an eye on.

[Stu_2011]

It's an interesting material, it's been around for a few years now but like most metal foams people haven't really used them to full effect. I used a copper foam heatsink ( I made it myself by a metal powder sintering route) about 15 years ago, It had a skin of high purity copper on the outside and we pumped water through the open cell mesh, the high surface area meant that heat could extracted really really well.