Does your smartphone suffer from overheating all the time? Well, you need not worry anymore! Scientists have developed a new coating that may prevent mobile phones and laptops from getting overheated. Inspired by the sweating mechanism in mammals, this coating releases water vapour that keeps prevents devices from heating up and keeps them cool. According to a PTI report, the new thermal management method could prove to be more effective in keeping electronic devices cool than the existing methods. This coating dissipates excess heat from the devices, hence not letting the device from getting overheated.
Ruzhu Wang, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, said that smartphones and laptops, which are mostly microelectronics, usually get overheated since all the components within are tightly packed which may lead to the chips getting really hot. This had led to the need for developing efficient thermal management techniques which may keep the devices cool. If an effective cooling system is not developed, users could have a system breakdown on their phones or burn their hands due to the overheating. Larger electronic items like computers, etc use fans to regulate temperature, said the report. However, these fans are large in size and bulky and noisy which makes them unsuitable for being used in microelectronics like mobile phones.
In the existing cooling methods, phase change materials (PCMs) like waxes and fatty acids are being used for cooling phones. The waxes and fatty acids absorb heat produced by devices when they melt, hence cooling the devices in return. However, the total amount of energy exchanged during this transition is relatively low. In contrast to the existing method, the latest liquid-vapour transition method can exchange 10 times more the energy.
While researching on the new cooling element, Wang and his team found metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) the most promising elements as they could store a large amount of water, therefore, effective in absorbing more heat from the devices. However, due to the hefty price of MOFs, its large-scale application did prove to be really practical.
The researchers selected a particular type of MOFs called MIL-101(Cr) for the experiment because of its good water-absorbing capacity and high sensitivity to temperature changes. It was found that the MIL-101Cr coating was able to delay the temperature rise in the devices, and its effect increased more and more with the coating thickness.
According to the report, while an uncoated MOF sheet reached 60 degrees Celsius after 5.2 minutes, the thinnest coating doubled the time and didn’t reach the same temperature until 11.7 minutes. The report sais that the sheet with the thickest coating reached 60 degrees Celsius after 19.35 minutes of heating.
