Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Extreme water cooling
c64:
Is it OK to submerge a working PCB in distilled water?
ejeffrey:
Not really. Distilled water is corrosive, It will attack metals and other materials on your board and quickly become not distilled. At that point it is conductive plus you have corroded your board. Immersive cooling is generally done with non-polar liquids.
Berni:
If the 220V power supply is left outside it would probably work for a while, but then the water would leech some of the metals and other crap into itself and become conductive again.
But even then you would get worse cooling performance compared to normal waterblock cooling solutions. Heatsinks designed for air don't work so well in water.
ChristofferB:
I dont think it's so much heat sinks being worse while submerged as much as the fluid (air or liquid) being still, as opposed to a forced flow
Berni:
Well for natural convection cooling id guess an heatsink designed for air also works well for water.
But when it comes to forced cooling the large long straight surfaces of an air cooled heatsink is far from ideal for water. The long fins present a lot of restriction to flow and the water loves to form a laminar flow along the surface so very little water comes into contact. The large heatsink also presents a lot of unnecessary thermal resistance.
For this reason heatsinks designed for water that are used in waterblocks are very different. They have lots of very tiny short fins to keep the useful surface area up despite laminar flow. The short fins also make for less thermal resistance from the base to the tip of the fin, the small size also makes it sensible to make it out of solid copper to reduce thermal resistance even more.
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