Replacement of heat sink fan by nanocoolants for enhancement of CPU efficiency

Abstract

The highest temperature under which a CPU can operate without interruption is 90°C. Heat sink fans generally provided for removal of heat produced by the processor are proved to be inadequate when CPU usage is 100%. The objective of this work is to exploit the enhanced thermal properties of nanofluid for dissipation of heat from the Intel (R) Core (TM) i5- 2310 CPU @ 2.9GHz quad-core processor for cooling it to a suitable operating temperature. Nanocoolants were prepared with two types of nanoparticles, titania and copper. The volume percentage of nanoparticles in nanocoolants were 0.01 and 0.1. It was observed that nanofluids are more efficient coolants than the base fluid and found to be significantly better than the traditional heat sink fan, as indicated by the CPU temperature, under the same loading condition. The average CPU temperatures were 90°C, 58°C, 56.6°C and 54.5°C with heat sink fan, deionized water, 0.1 vol% TiO2 and 0.1 vol% Cu nanofluids respectively at the flow rate of 700ml/min and CPU usage of 100%. The lowest CPU operating temperature (54.5°C) was obtained with 0.1 vol% Cu at the flow rate of 700ml/min. The cooling of CPU was also affected by the flow rate and the volume fraction of nanoparticles in the nanocoolant.