Cooling Water Block Design

I have recently downloaded SketchUp 6 and have a lot of free time so I spend my days looking at bit-tech and designing water blocks. All of my blocks look good but would be extremely hard to mill and are flow killers. I want to make a good block.

So what makes a good water block??? What makes them so they are not flow killers??? How do you design a good water block??? What points do you want to focus water spray on???

 

I'm no expert, but its more about flow over the most surface area possible. Hence why many designs now, have pins in the core area.

 

Agreed. A while back they had channels over the CPU to hasten heat dissipation, but now the majority of high end waterblocks have pins as Shadwed Fury mentioned.

I think that waterblock design is mostly trial and error. Start by mimicking popular designs of current or older blocks.

You could also post jpegs of your designs for critique.

 

Suraface area is a must but you need to balence this out with a flow because you may have a large surface area but it blocks the flow to much so this wouldnt be as effective its all about balencing out the factors.

If you really wanted an uber block make it out of silver lol.

 

Why should he make it out of silver?

 

ok just let me upload them

 

It's a good conductor. But more importantly, it's all about the bling bling.

 

Are you sure that silver's a good conductor? When I was an intro to physics lab TA, I did this demo every year where an alum block had tubes of various metals impregnated. The entire thing was left in liquid nitrogen for a while. Then I took it out (the alum block had a wood stick or something similarly not freezing attached to it) breathed water vapor onto it to make it frosty, and put the large alum block over a burner.

You could tell which was a good thermal conductor b/c the water vaor frost would evaporate as the thermal wave reached it. Copper started out victorious with alum close behind. Eventually, copper and alum reached the finish line (the end of the tubes) at about the same time, and all the other materials were left in the dust.

In other words, it's copper or aluminum - anything else will make a poor water block. A poor water block design made of copper with greatly outperform a good design made from poor thermal conductor materials.

 

here is the link if you want to download them to get a better view
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=f49b5fa7d9503416f8f325b3cf055d35&scoring=d

and here are pics

Water Block 1


Water Block 2


Water Block 3


Water Block 4

 

Those look good, but like you said, they're likely too inefficient to be of any benefit.

Also, Sketchup has an export feature which lets you take a screenshot of the design as it currently is displayed. That might make sharing w/ us a bit more manageable and less of a hassle.

Still, at least they look nice! I think you might be better off starting with a known and proven design and work from there.

 

No, actually . I'm not a physicist or anything, it's just something I've heard. After a visit to The Mighty Google, the only sources I can find to back me up are:

And Overclockers.com.

So I may be wrong.

 

I knew that they wouldn't be worth it to build, I don't even think you would be able to mill it to the exact specs, but they do look good. I like Water Block 4 the most but that would be the hardest on flow

 

Ok, I did some looking around wikipedia and webelements. Silver actually is a better thermal and electrical conductor.

However, even though sterling silver is more durable, it's still pretty soft - too soft to be machines into a block I'm thinking.

 

soft metal is really hard to mill, either it moves or it melts in the mill


went the US mints pure gold it is hard to get a perfect coin because pure gold is almost like putty

 

Diamond is a very good thermal conductor, and good electrical insulator IIRC. ideal choice, but i should think a wee bit hard to mill.....

plus finding a large enough block to mill could be difficult.

 

Ponying up the dough for the large chunk would be the difficult part. =P

 

Silver's perfectly suitable for a WC block, as said, it has the highest thermal and electrical conductivity, and it's pretty good for machining too, the only downside is the expense of building a solid silver WC block.

AFAIK MDK had a silver block, was ~£120 I think...

[edit]It was a Little River Cascade block, made of solid silver.

 

How about this one(and it's silver), I think it looks kind of like a DD maze4

 

That one looks more plausible. My shelved Antarctica block had two outlets. Changes ot this block: flatten out the corners a bit so there's more free area beneath the outlets, and you don't need the sharp corners at the middle either. Also, if two outlets, there should be channeling in the center such that water is kind of divided towards the outlets. Or you could pin it out to increase surface area.

 

Just a quick tip, if it hasn't already been mentioned.

water dynamics is a lot like aerodynamics. In your designs you have water "jumping" over obstacles, it should be flowing around obstacles.
A little turbulence in the block is a good thing, too much and you loose a large chunk of its cooling effect(plus killing your flow rate).
Water, like air, when traveling (or pushed) over an obstacle, creates a vacuum on the other side. Like a slipstream of a race car. This is less obvious with water but it's still there. This vacuum traps water in it rendering the surface of your block (in the vacuumed) areas useless.
A good example is a breakwater in a harbor. A large wave hits it and sprays over the top