Immersive Computing Environment
Posted by Eric Seymour on 17 April 2008 | 4 responses
This is pretty cool. Some students in David Heddle’s department at Christopher Newport University took all the components of a desktop computer and placed them in a fish tank filled with mineral oil. It’s neat to look at, but I wonder if it provides improved cooling efficiency over a traditional air-cooled system?
4 Responses to “Immersive Computing Environment”
It does indeed. The liquid moves heat much more efficiently than air (or rather air, a heatsink and a fan).
The issue this creates is that mineral oil could will dirty with time and the cables that are exposed will slowly absorb the oil, meaning the keyboard and mouse will start to get oil on their insides.
Still this makes for a fun project.
I was wondering how you’d get the heat out of the mineral oil. I think you’d need some kind of heat exchanger, or at least a fan blowing across the surface of the oil, because the heat transfer across the wall of the tank isn’t going to be that great.
I think the heat transfer from the glass is indeed sufficient in this case. I’ve seen similar projects that just submerge the components. Admitedly, those had open tops, meaning the oil had direct contact with air.
With invention of USB, and the ability to hook up external modems and drives and routers and so forth, the whole underside of my desk has basically become a big computer.