Cooling I have a question about Copper and Aluminum please

Ok, I'm thinkinh up a reinventation of the modern airconditioner which I'm prettty sure has not been done before...


I'm looking at the front radiator (the cold one) on a AC and it looks to be amunum but with those rond things on the end look to be copper. Basicly what I'm asking is if Aluminum disapates heat fast why do people use only copper for water cooling applications and why aluminum at all in air conditoners?

 

Copper is a good conductor of heat, but compared to Aluminium its poor at radiating it away.

so the best is a two proged attack, using a copper slug to get the heat away from the CPU and then using aluminium fins to radiate it away, or in watercooling using an aluminum radiator and a copper waterblock.

Unfortunately this then adds the problem of dissimilar metals not playing nice together, has anyone toyed with a sacraficial anode?

 

Right, simply, copper is a much better conductor of heat than aluminium but aluminium radiates heat better than copper.

What you see in your aircon unit is a copper pipe rad with aluminium fins. This allow the heat to be conducted rapidly to the coolant using the copper having been transferred from the air by the better radiating aluminium. Simple

People use copper in w/c systems due to it's better heat conduction properties over aluminium - tho the aluminium would dissipate the accumulated heat into the water more efficiently than the copper, the copper will conduct the heat away from the processor more efficiently and so outperform an identical aluminium block - we are, after all, in the business of cooling processors after all

Hope that helps ya out a bit - I'm sure someone else will be able to explain this better using physics and metallurgy *sits back and waits for extremely knowledgable people to post *

edit: Cabe, ya beat me to it

 

Copper is the preferred material in PC water cooling because copper has a better heat conduction/dissipation than aluminium. It is also much more expensive however, and heavier. You'd be surprised how much even a small (all copper) Blackice Xtreme weighs, let alone a Mora GC...

It therefore makes sense for AC companies to use aluminium-- not only is it cheaper, and easier to work with, but it also means you don't have a seriously heavy beast hanging out of your window, or bolted on your wall.

For PC users weight is less of a consideration than heat dissipation (except that too heavy a waterblock threatens to crack your motherboard... ). So why aren't there copper PC cases? Well, there are. But if you thought a Coolermaster was expensive, the cost of one of those is prohibitive.

 

well, in this experiment I may be preforming later I want it so that the radiator will work to help the coolant absorb coldness from a peltier, or in otherwords disapate the heat away to the pelteir which would cover the entire back of the radiator. So from your information I assume that a 100% aluminum radiator would do this best right?

 

This sorta sounds like a water chiller...is this what your doing?

 

lol, I might as well revel my pal because it seems to me like it would not make much difference. What I was thinking was a system that uses a Peltier to cool the water or coolant/freezon then pump that slowly through the incomming radiator and it would chill the air colder than today's standard window air conditioner. The peltier would be water coold on its side that gets hot and it would utilize a radiator in the back of the unit for the water cooling procedure, just like in a water cooled rig. So it would be 3 radiators.
One in front chilling the air
one in the middle which the peltier is attached to, to chill the coolant.
One in the back for the radiating of heat off of the peltier.


and ofcource their would be other things in it that would further efficentize the system.

Oh well...

 

Hey Ocean there was a guy on pro-cooling forums that talked about an idea similar to yours. I don't have a link to the thread, but if you look around I'm sure you can find it. To be perfectly honest i don't think it would be very efficient, but i've never tried it before. Give it a go...and show us when its done