Can putting sand in your computer be a good thing?

Sand in your computer sounds like something you’d like to avoid, right? Well, a research team at Georgia Institute of Technology is deliberately introducing sand into computers to help cool them.

It’s not just any old sand, though. They use silicon dioxide nanoparticles coated with a high dielectric constant polymer that provides improved cooling for increasingly power-hungry electronic devices.

The silicon dioxide itself doesn’t do the cooling. Rather, the unique surface properties of the coated nanoscale material conduct the heat at potentially higher efficiency than existing heat sink materials.

This could lead to a new class of high thermal conductivity materials that are useful for heat dissipation from power electronics, LEDs and other applications with high heat fluxes, the researchers say.

“We have shown for the first time that you can take a packed nanoparticle bed that would typically act as an insulator and, by causing light to couple strongly into the material by engineering a high dielectric constant medium like water or ethylene glycol at the surfaces, you can turn the nanoparticle bed into a conductor,” said Baratunde Cola, an associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“Using the collective surface electromagnetic effect of the nanoparticles, the thermal conductivity can increase 20-fold, allowing it to dissipate heat.”

Further testing is needed to ensure the technique’s long-term efficiency and to confirm that it doesn’t impact on the reliability of the electronic devices it cools.

The research was published in the journal Materials Horizons and was also highlighted in the 8 July issue of the journal Science.