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Love your articles and YouTube videos.

There is still the issue of dissipating the waste heat. = Keeping the coolant cool. Maybe we should be using the waste heat to heat building and homes. I remember steam tunnels in cities to heat buildings in cities. This would just be a different heat source than burning fuels to produce steam, or more practical - hot water.

On a small scale I looked at ads for gamer computers with liquid cooling. The seem to have multiple fans to cool the liquid and dissipate the heat.

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Hey, this is Frank, and I am having an automotive perspective on cooling. What I learned: In automotive historically, engineers design against the max Junction Temperature Tj. In many cases this was 125°C, in some special applications it goes up to 165°C. Chips need to resist to a certain temperature over lifetime profile ... which needs to be calculated carefully that it can fulfill the requirement of an automotive live (e.g. 15000h of operation). But things are changing here also! With the higher and higher performant chips, especially in infotainment and ADAS there are challenges ahead. What I learned the hard way: It is not only dark silicon which makes it complicated, but also leakage currents, which are highly dependent (exponentially) on temperature. So my recommendation is:

Cool it baby, cool it!

There was light at the end of the tunnel when electrification of vehicles became more and more a thing. In EVs there is almost every time a good possibility to "attach" to a liquid cooling system. There are even sophisticated intelligent systems in the EVs (e.g. Tesla Octovalve) which balance temperature "needs" between systems as much as possible. This results in better temperature over lifetime profiles & less TDP which is good for the silicon in terms of lifetime, reliability and surprisingly also for safety (FIT rates also are calculated based on temperature profiles).

Unfortunately, especially in Europe and US OEM are stepping back from 100% electrification by 203x and so all goes south what looked so bright. The vehicle platforms will continue to support both electric motors and internal combustion engines. The worst case influx liquid temperature at your cooling plate is ~70°C ... thanks to the ICE ...

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