Scientists from several countries have managed to identify a phenomenon that breaks with all known heat control paradigms in the field of electronics and already points a way that could avoid the Heating the devices.
A team from the Madrid Science Institute (ICMM-CSIC), together with the University of Colorado Boulder (USA) He has revealed for the first time a heat transport mechanism that breaks with the classic paradigms of thermal engineering, and have published the results of their work in the magazine Nature Materials.
One of the greatest current social challenges is to achieve sustainable use of resources and energy and reconcile that challenge with the rise of digital technologies such as artificial intelligencewhich according to some estimates will consume about 5 percent of world energy, recalled the ICMM-CSIC in a press release released today.
The discovery promotes a nUeva Esperanza in the search for more powerful electronic devices and at the same time more efficient, has assured the same source.
“Who has not heated the mobile after opening several applications, using the GPS or watching videos?”Guilherme Vilhena, a researcher at the ICMM-CSIC and one of the main authors of the work, and has assured that the current that feeds these circuits generates so much heat that it could damage the device.
From there, the researcher recalled in the note, The importance of cooling electronic circuits, especially when they are as compacted as in a smartphone or in the processors of the supercomputing centers that feed artificial intelligence.
In these centers, the energy cost of cooling the processors can be the same or even greater than the energy used to feed them. “This is a critical challenge that demands new disruptive thermal solutions,” said Vilhena.
To face it, researchers have rescued a concept of quantum mechanics, that of the ‘Onda-particle duality’, And they have detailed what their discovery consists of.
“We can understand the heat flow as particles (phonones) that spread from a hot source to a cold,” explained Pablo Martínez, also a researcher at the ICMM-CSIC and author of the work; However, when it is lowered to the nanometric scale (the millmillonieth part of a meter, and the typical size of the components of a microchip) “the undulating nature of this phenomenon emerges.”
The authors have observed for the first time at room temperature the undulating properties of these ‘heat carriers’, and have verified whatand “Exploit this new character (undulatory) allows to design ways of suppressing almost completely the thermal flow, something that was unattainable in the classic paradigms.
The University of Colorado Boulder has been perfecting thermal probes for years that, now, have opened the possibility of studying that heat transport to the Nanoscale. “Our collaborators contacted us an intriguing result: very slightly changing the structure of a molecule, it was possible to suppress heat transport by more than 40 percent,” Martínez, a member of the Vilhena team, said, and finally it was in the ICMM-CSIC where that phenomenon was explained.
In recent years, the ICMM-CSIC group collaborated with the Autonomous University of Madrid to develop New theoretical and numerical methods that allow us to understand atom atom the relationship between its thermal vibrations and the ability to transmit heat.
The work, in which researchers from the Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche (Italy) have also participated, opens opportunities to study numerous material properties based on the wave character of heat carriers (phonones).
“We are one step closer to designing something as revolutionary as devices that let the heat pass only in a sense”Pablo Martínez stressed.
The advance would allow to channel the energy lost in heat in any industry for its use, recycling or the design of smart windows that actively hot or cool according to the season, among other applications, the researchers have completed.