Thermal Resistance of Cascade Heat Pipe as CPU Cooling System to Maintain Safe Temperature for Computer

Abstract

Computer will overheat quickly if used in a state of full load continuously. One component on a computer that generates heat is the central processing unit (CPU) which is a key component on a computer where program instructions are processed. One of the right solutions to cool the CPU is the use of heat pipes as cooling system, using several size container, loaded with a special liquid liquid to deliver the heat from the evaporator zone to the other end called condenser zone, but because the heat pipe condenser output temperature is still high therefore a cascade heat pipe was created to lower the output temperature. In this study there are four CPU cooling systems used namely single condenser cascade heat pipe and a double condenser cascade heat pipe, while others two cooling systems as a comparison namely non-cascade heat pipe and non-cascade heat pipe with fan. This study aims to find out the cooling performance of cascade heat pipe as CPU cooling system in a small form factor desktop PC by testing variations in workload, the workload given is idle load (12W) where the processor only runs the operating system without the software load so the processor utilization is only 1% -10%. Next is the medium load (30W) that uses 2 threads with processor utilization of 50% -90%. The last workload is full load (35W) with the number of threads used being 4 with processor utilization of 90% -100%. This research found that the thermal resistance of the cascade heat pipe tended to be higher than that of the non-cascade heat pipe, however the increase that occurred was not too large compared to the resulting performance of  60.2°C in the processor and 40.4°C in the heat sink for the cascade double condenser, the operating temperature of the CPU does not increase significantly as the thermal resistance increases on the cascade heat pipe.