INTEL SPONSORS ELECTRONIC COOLING COMPETITION

Mechanical Engineering graduate students enrolled in this Fall’s Multiphase Flow and Heat Transfer course (ENME 647) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering will have the chance to compete against each other in the Electronic Cooling Competition. The Intel Corporation has generously donated $5,000 to cover the costs associated with this competition.

The objective of the competition is to cool a computer processor as inexpensively as possible using a liquid-cooled heat sink instead of the standard air-cooling unit. Students must use the most compact hardware with the least expensive parts possible. Power consumption must be kept at a minimum. The liquid heat sink must clip on to the processor in the same way as the air-cooled heat sink would, and must fit in the computer case. The new technology will be compared to the baseline air-cooled system recommended by the chip manufacturer.

The students are to demonstrate the cooling performance of a heat sink that utilizes two-phase flow. Spray cooling, impingement jet cooling, thermosyphons, flow boiling, and heat pipes are possible technologies that will be attempted.

A similar competition will be held as part of the undergraduate Transfer Process course (ENME 332) in the 2004 Spring semester. For more information about this competition, contact Dr. Jungho Kim, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, at (301) 405-5437.

Published October 15, 2003