New Technology to Prevent Overheating of Laptops

Many of the laptop users naturally gets into uncomfortable zone when their laptops gets heated up. But this overheating of the laptops is no more a worry today.Newer technologies have been invented that assures the best relief for the heating of the laptops.The technology termed “Radiation Therapy “ has a solution for it.

Laptop consists of very minute sized semiconductors like diodes, which on development of the technology, has reduced size whereas the performance and the accuracy increased. But the heat generated by the hardware components of the laptop does not reduce. A technological fact is that a laptop can emit heat as fast as a small nuclear reactor emits its heat.

Rotkin, an assistant professor of physics, worked on the heat generation of the laptops and with the help of his colleagues, they have made an alternative. Rotkin and his colleagues at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center and at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, have a discovered a new way the heat dissipation method that used to cool the nano tube electronics.

This is made possible by using the Non-Conventional Energy in the “near-field zone”, which is a place above the surface where the nanotubes are placed. This cooling technology involves the nanotubes’ substrate composed of a polar material, basically a silicon – dioxide. This method ventilates the heat from the nanotubes into the substrate.

The substrate, a larger surface can be more effectively cooled through the vents that is used to allow the cooled air through the laptops. This technology involves the heat to leave the channel and move to the substrate, thus providing cooling effect without any usage of cooling agents or chemicals.

The nanotubes and the substrate are heterogeneous materials; hence the rate of the heat release is very low, which is a very similar characteristic of the Dry Wood. Rotkin and his colleagues used the thermal coupling by exploiting the scattering of the electrons which naturally make its presence in the non-suspended nanotube transistors made of carbon which they call as Surface Phonon – Polariton (SPP) The Electron Scattering produces a wave called Surface Polariton which is in particular very strong in the near field zone just above the substrate on which the carbon nanotubes are placed.

When the carbon nanotubes are put in a near field zone, it enables the hot electrons to get scattered due to the Surface Polariton and gives out the energy to the substrate. The mechanism is absent when the nanotube is moved away from the substrate as the near field tunneling is ceased. The coupling actions are all achieved through the surface polarization scattering. This is due to the large enhancement of the electrical field of the polariton in the near field zone. Almost all the semiconductor devices are fabricated in recent days have their own nanotubes or atleast nano wire placed directly on a substrate made of silicon which is polar.

A stronger substrate material is made of dielectric rather than making from silicon. This is due to the reason that the higher the Dielectric Constant, higher the strength , hence the stronger surface polariton. The researchers used the microscopic quantum to determine that dissipation of the heat. Heat dissipation is calculated depending upon certain factors like:

* Electric Field
* Doping
* Temperature.

The energy losses are dissipated into the polar substrate only and do not play any role in the temperature rise of the Field Effect Transistor.

Another interesting fact is that the most of the energy losses are dissipated directly into the polar substrate and do not contribute to Field Effect Transistor temperature rise. Thus this radiation therapy seems to be an effective remedy for overheating of laptop as the surface phonon-polariton thermal coupling increases the effective thermal conductance over the nanotube and polar substrate. Further research is going on to prevent the laptop overheating.