How does the Heat dissipation work

 Heat dissipation systems

 

Hope you have read my last article about the parts inside your phones. If you have not read that please checkout, so all these power that any electronic device generate has one side effect, heat. Without a proper cooling system the phone cant be used at its full maximum. Today we are going to see how smartphones get cooled on the inside.

 

Thermal management: For thermal management in electronics, there is a component called as heat sink is used to dissipate heat. This heat sink is of 2 types. One is active and the second one is passive cooling and in this article we are going to see about both of them

Active cooling system: it is a heat-reducing mechanism that is used in electronic devices for the dissipation of heat by using active systems (I.e) It uses various mechanical systems that consume energy to dissipate heat. It uses a fan that is attached to the S.O.C of the device which acts as a vacuum to such the heat and on the other side it is connected to the vent which pushes the heat out on the other end.

 

Passive cooling systems: It is another types of heat dissipation system that is used in places where mechanical components like fans cannot be used or cant be afforded, like budget laptops or mobile phones. In passive cooling systems there are several types used from which 2 of them being popular. One is Using a heat spreader and the other one is by using a vapour chamber 

 

1. Heat spreader:  In this method the the heat is transferred from the soc to a spreader which has bigger surface area than the soc itself which by the name suggests spreads the heat so that the overall temperature is reduced and is dissipated off naturally.

2. Vapour chamber cooling system: It uses the water vapour particles to cool down by the natural process of covection.

While both of them has its own upsides they come with it’s own caveats (downsides) as well.

 

Pros and cons of active cooling systems

Pros:

1. As there is an active and mechanical component throwing off air, the heat can be better controlled. And it allows manual options for you to adjust the RPM of the fan yourself.

2. For the same reason it allows better productivity too, because unlike passive cooling systems the fan ‘maintains’ the performance better.

Cons:

1. As there is a mechanical part involved inside, due to wear and tear it may get damaged which reduces the overall life span of any product with this method of cooling.

2. Whenever the fan is on you may hear the noise

3. It may collect dust and debris inside the machine and this inevitably slows down the performance of the fan over time.

 

Pros and cons of a passive cooling system

Pros:

1. As there is less vertical space this can be used in smaller form factors. I.e you can keep it in thin and light laptops or mobile phones.

2. It is much cheaper than the fan so it could be used in cheaper laptops.

3. As there is no mechanical parts there is no wear and tear inside

Cons:

1.even though there is less vertical space required it also need a bigger horizontal space so there is lesser horizontal space inside a space limited laptop for other components.

2. in the both of the methods of using this type of cooling there is a limit, I.e if the passive coolers get too hot it reduces the overall performance to reduce the heat produced by the CPU sot hat it allows the coolers to dissipate heat off to absorb more heat later.

 

Conclusion

The active cooling system is used wherever more power is needed, and where there is a generous amount of vertical space inside the machine that you are using.

Like desktop computers which has 2 or more fans to cool the insanely powerful circuitry inside it.

The passive cooling systems are used in places where there is very less vertical space  inside the machine, like your mobile phones where there is no active cooling or smaller and thin and light computers.

 

Hope you have learnt something from this article. Thanks for reading. Meet you with another one.

Have a great day