source: Stanford.edu
Recently researchers have made a new type of heat shield for electronics that is just 10 atoms thick, made with Graphene and other materials that promises a safe and could make our electronics much more close-packed in the near future.
As we all know, the main issue with electronics is that they produce a lot of heat which degrades them overtime, we can recall many issues with throttling processors both in smartphones and laptops. that why many laptops have cooling systems that include spinning fans and heat sinks, and smartphones include thermal heat pipes to hopefully cool them down to avoid serious damage that can not only destroy the device it self but also put you in danger. But in most cases the heat always manage to slow down the performance of your device.
But Stanford electrical engineer Eric Pop says that they are trying an entirely new and different approach to deal with this issue, when electrons pass through an electric circuit they generate small vibrations that generate heat but also creates high sound frequencies that humans can't hear. Just like we use insulated glazing in our homes to reduce heat and sound transfer, the researchers used the same method to develop the four layers heat shield composed of Graphene, molybdenum diselenide , molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide, which is about :
To make commercially available the researchers have to find a practical way of mass producing to some how either spray or place the thin layers on electronics as process of manufacturing. Scientists still hope to go beyond developing thin heat insulators, the control of the vibrational energy is the ultimate goal to achieve since they already know how to control electricity and light. like Eric Pop said: " As engineers, we know quite a lot about how to control electricity, and we’re getting better with light, but we’re just starting to understand how to manipulate the high-frequency sound that manifests itself as heat at the atomic scale,"