Liquid cooling is generally associated with enthusiast-level gaming computers but Fujitsu wants to bring the cooling method over to smartphones as well. Although many smartphones get hot during heavy use, it’s not nearly enough to warrant liquid cooling and I don’t know of very many people who overclock their smartphone’s hardware. Even so, it does have its benefits and it would certainly be interesting to see some liquid-cooled smartphones.
Fujitsu has developed an approach to cooling smartphones that it claims can achieve five times greater heat transfer than metal or graphite sheets. One of the side effects of packing smartphones with ever more powerful components into smaller spaces is heat, which can be uncomfortable for the user and cause wear and tear on components. As Fujitsu notes, the conventional method for managing the excess heat generated by components in a smartphone has been to install sheets of metal or graphite with relatively high thermal conductivity. But the company claims that the thermal conductive properties of these materials have reached their limit. Fujitsu’s answer to this is the ‘loop heat pipe’, a thin heat-transfer device filled with a liquid coolant that works to move heat away from the hot component towards a cooler part of the device.
