What about the heat pipes?
Heat pipes are there to move heat from one place to another very efficiently. Copper is often used as a material for heatpipes because it has a very high thermal conductivity. This property allows heatpipes to absorb and dissipate heat quickly, which is important in numerous applications such as cooling graphics cards in this case. Inside a heat pipe, you will often find what is known as a composite material called a “wound structure.”
This structure can be made of various materials such as copper wire mesh, sintered metal or other capillary-active materials, and it is responsible for transporting the working fluid (often water or a special coolant) that evaporates inside the heat pipe back to the heat source, where it can evaporate again. This creates an efficient cycle of heat transfer. Choosing the right composite material and its structure is critical to the efficiency of a heat pipe.
Now at this point I must qualify that I did NOT cut up the test object because I still need it in working condition. So I can test all layers of the outer shell, but I don’t want to drill through the whole copper, because then the needed vacuum would be gone, too. But (we can see it in the picture above) these heatpipes, like the cooling fins, are black coated. And that’s where the customer and the reader have to go through now. But before that, let’s take another look at the surface in 2D under the microscope:
And because it was so nice, once again in 3D:
Ok, nice gimmick, but what was actually piled up there? Here I had to shoot several times until I really got to the actual shell. You need more than 8 shots to really laser through the thick cover. And even then, there’s always something to be found…
Only after the 15th bull’s eye do we reach the pure copper. I could drill through to the inside now, but then I would irreversibly damage the winding structure and give the air access. The total loss would not be wanted, so I stop here. If I ever find a defective cooler, I’ll be happy to cut it open again.
And no, this is not the moon with its craters, but two impacts of my laser. But it’s true, there’s something cosmic about it.
And where does the waste heat go now finally? Exactly that tells us the last page!
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