Seven students from the UW-Madison ZeroG team worked at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, designing and testing an experiment of their choice in varying gravity conditions. The results from the UW-Madison experiment show a particular spray cooling method is not dependent on gravity — a significant finding that means spray cooling could be used in airplane and other high-heat electronics.
Circuits on a computer chip have temperature-dependent performances — when chips get too hot, they slow down. Air-cooling methods, which use fans to blow air across the chips, are not ideal for supercomputers or large server banks. The team had developed a system that sprays dielectric liquid in a linear array directly onto the chips. The direct contact maximizes the amount of heat transferred from the chip to the liquid. Traditional methods direct the liquid upward, relying on gravity to drain the liquid away.
However, this won’t work in airplanes or spacecraft, which go through varying gravity conditions. To be reliable, spray cooling has to be not gravity dependent.
Linear spray array could be the answer, but testing was difficult. That is where Zero G came in. The team found that linear spray cooling is effective in both zero gravity and double gravity conditions.
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