Oil cooled pc

Oil cooled pc

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A oil cooled pc is simply a computer that instead of using air as a medium to transfer heat away from cpu north bridge ecc. uses some kind of oil.

How it works.
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By submerging the computer in various oils the heat produced by the cpu, gpu ram power supply and other parts (cdrom and hard drive are left out to prevent slowing of the motors) is drawn away from the parts preventing over heating. This is done ether by sealing a plastic computer case or by using a fish tank or other such liquid container. The oil can have passive heat exchange (letting the hot oil rise and cold oil sink) or active heat exchange (using circulatory pumps fans or bubbles to move the oil).

Why it doesn't blow up.
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Oil unlike watter is non-polar and because of this it is a pore conductor of electricity.
Choices of oils. There have bean attempts at a oil cooled pc using veritable oil but seeings how vegetable oil goes rancid after several days it was determined to be ineffective for long term use. Mineral oil (baby Oil, electrical insulating oil, adepsine oil) possessing the same specific heat capacity as vegetable oil but having no problem with rancidity as is other option. As an added bonus it is clear.

Cooling the oil.
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The only question is now that you have the heat in the oil what do you do with it. Puget Custom Computers has found with there test that under typical conditions the computer has little chance of over heating with a passive heat transfer from oil to air (it took 12 hours under load for heat to stabilize at 88C on the cpu). Further of there tests showed a lowered maximum temp when using bubbles or a radiator to actively export the heat to the air(using bubbles lowered the max temp to 84C, and a radiator lowered it to 45C).

Long term effects on the computer.
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There have bean machines using oil cooling for close to a year and there have bean no major problems reported. There is still some concern over some oils (vegetable oil for one) weather or not they may be corrosive to various parts of the computer. Another concern is that because oil is more dense than air or watter will fans or pumps break down quicker. Again there the use of oil as coolant being resent there is no answer to the long term effect on fans or pumps, but current test have yet to report problems.

references
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(1)http://en. .org/wiki/Mineral_oil
(2)http://youtube.com/watch?v=t8shVDvMdo4
(3)http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php
(4)http://youtube.com/watch?v=M80eUcUVrmw
(5)http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-fluids-d_151.html
(6)http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/general_physics/2_6/2_6_3.html

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