Laptop Cooler Design Survey

Hello everyone! I am a member of CDJ Engineering. We are a three person team based out of Greenfield Central High School, Indiana. For our PLTW class: Engineering Design & Development, we are tasked with finding a real world problem, and to solve it.

We have chosen to solve the issue of laptops frequently overheating, and current laptop coolers being inadequate as you may have seen through other surveys here on this forum. Through our engineering design process, we have gotten to the point where we have three different designs to solve this problem. However, we are not qualified to decide which of these three designs we will choose. YOU, the potential consumer, will decide this, based off your wants and needs. So, we ask that you take the time to complete our survey, answer truthfully, and give us feedback. Thank you!

http://goo.gl/forms/KhsfmScFkt

**********THIS IS NOT SPAM! IT IS FOR A PLTW SCHOOL CAPSTONE PROJECT!**********

 

Seems spammy to me. Didn't you post a thread exactly like this earlier?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/accessories/766026-laptop-intercooler-market-research.html

 

No. Look at the survey. Market research is very different from the design. The market research was in order for us to determine what people want out of a cooler. Now, we have taken these responses and created our designs.

 

My bad then. Carry on.

 

Thank you!

 

Hmm, don't really want a cooler. Would love a solid aluminium laptop body with integrated heatpipes all through and over. Weight be d*mned. Now, if it has to be a cooler; whatever works best, wouldn't you think?

 

Hi OP,

Idea 1 and Idea 2 are very bog-standard designs - there are literally hundreds of different chinese manufacturers that make laptop coolers like this.

If you want to get top marks and/or come up with a really good design - my advice would be to INNOVATE. Come up with some ingenious or new that makes your product have at least one feature/aspect that no other laptop coolers on the market currently have. Idea 3 sort of fits this description in that I have never seen a folding cooler before, but it has to be a feature/aspect that people would actually want/care for.

Try to brainstorm a little more.

 

Laptop cooler unless is laptop specific the vast majority of most laptop would depend on how it was used and what environment and also if one doesn't dissemble and clean out the fan and heatsink and reapply the thermal paste no amount of cooling pad will help. And the what would work better is a stand that the laptop sits on to elevate the back side will do far more to improve air flow to keep the laptop cool.

 

Make a Notepal U3 with some decent 140mm fans (high static pressure would be first priority, for example: gentle typhoon fans). You'd have to find a way around the patented clippable fan system though.

 

Well, first of all, I have not seen a single cooler design with side intakes. All designs i have seen simply have fans on the top pulling air through the bottom. Which when it goes on your lap, these intake vents get blocked and the air pressure is lowered significantly. We have thought about the possible folding aspect to the cooler, however, from our market research, everyone preferred not to have it be fold-able in favor of other accessories.

Other than all that, thank you all for the feedback. We are still able to alter designs and we are taking all of this into mind.

Lastly, I am not trying to be ignorant. Please prove me wrong. I'd rather be proven wrong here than in front of a board of engineers.

 

i don't think the angling helps
but i might be wrong
personally i think it will cause disproportionate air flow

 

Well to your "vents get blocked" this means the user hasn't taken the time to clean out the fans and vents causing them to be clogged with dust and dust bunnies. Cleaning this will more then improve the air flow that's what they need to do. What would work better would be like a cage with that holds the laptop but the backside up a inch or so and that is all it take to keep it cool for most laptops but for Gaming laptops that would depend on the design of it. Most general usage laptop pull air from the bottom and vents out the back side. A yearly maintenance of cleaning the fan and heatsink and reapplying thermal paste would more help most laptops to pull the heat away from the laptop. Coolers from what I seen is more gimmick then really improve air flow...also remember laptop are meant to be "Portable" all in one computing on the go-having to carry a cooler pad is waste of time and resources and where are you going to plug that cooler since the laptop has it's own power source when you have no way to power the cooler. Putting a battery in that cooler will incur weight and now you have carry more batteries to use it. So you being portable laptop on the go has just gone down by -1.

Actually the angle doesn't have to be much...a inch or so is all it takes to insure proper air flow under the vents and I used my laptop on flat desk and I can feel the heat and vents blows out the hot air and still works with no problems.

 

angling definetly helps when you vents that go to the underside of the laptop.. That's the main thing I don't like with my M17x... my G73jH had vents which were like the exhuast jets of F117/jet figters so there was no air going downwards.. it was being pushed upwards and outside..

With the M17x, angling has helped for sure for me.. The thing is coolers like Notepal U3 are angled too steeply.. A bit less of an angle and it would be perfect.. Just something for you guys to think about..

 

Yeah, might want to angle the grill instead. Gradually angling less outwards could be useful, and it also looks kickass. But I like the single half-meter fan idea the best.

The thing is that (..btw, this is where I ruin your will to put real effort into studying anything for the rest of your life ) an external laptop cooler has minimal to no impact of any sort on the actual temperature of the components or the internals of the laptop. Even if you imagined a way to replace the bottom panel of a laptop with something that cools the mainboard till it frosts over, it would not actually help the heat transfer significantly. In fact, if you were clever about this and limited it to improving the airflow around the radiator -- cooling the radiator /too much/ can act as a limited insulator if the material in the heat-pipes becomes too cold for optimal heat-transfer.

So the only real strategy to cooling the laptop well is a carefully thought out heat-pipe system where the radiator and the rest of the components are scaled specifically to the amount of heat the components give off (which you correctly observe is a rare thing - and even with this imaginary external cooler that drops the internal temperature to somewhere around -196 C, it doesn't replace the internal fans on the internal components).

In other words, what you're practically designing an external cooler for is - is to cool your thighs. So designing a successful external cooler should probably start with a good, unobtrusive, soft and comfortable clip-on dock (perhaps with an extra slice battery in it and a power cord..cheap to make, actually, along with pockets for memory cards and usb sticks, that sort of thing). That then perhaps is made of moldable heat-conducting material (...created by magic) that passively lead heat from the surface of the laptop chassis and off somewhere away from the user (out the back end?).

..seriously, though - might be worth it as an aside somewhere for extra credits, about the contrast between (proven) marketability and actual practical purpose. Just make sure you don't focus too much on it, or you're screwed.

 

Mine pulls both from the bottom and sides. The issue is two fold with these coolers.

1.) supplying enough air volume so that the fans need not struggle to get air to the bottom vents. In this these coolers work fine.

2.) ambient air temperature. In this these coolers do nothing to change it, Unless you do something to change there will be little to no help from these. Now you could use a thermo electric unit, such as is on the automotive iceless coolers. Since air volume is rather low with a sealed gap it is possible one (or two) of those 40w units could make a difference.

 

I've seen there have been over 300 views of this post. Please take the survey! it will take less than 2 minutes. If you don't want to do the write in portion, just type a period into the box.

We only have 10 survey takers on the survey. This is not enough. Please help us out.

Again. Not Spam. Thank you.

 

Oh, all right.

 

Problem is with the cooler the port where the fan sits and sucks air through is so small that the cooler fans aren't directly helping the fan but fan upon fan negates any real cooling effect.Worse it could over-spin the laptop fan shortening it's lifespan faster then otherwise. Those little fan have a rated speed and over spinning them will kill them.

 

Thank you to those of you who have taken this survey, however, we have collected the results we needed so the survey is now closed. Thank you all!