Plastic Coolers; November 2008; Scientific American Magazine; by Steven Ashley; 2 Page(s)

Whether they sit in your kitchen or inside your personal computer, refrigerators and other cooling devices are typically bulky, often noisy and frequently power-hungry. A team at Pennsylvania State University recently found that certain plastics cool off a significant amount¿12 degrees Celsius¿when an applied electric field is removed. Should the technique become feasible, the resulting solid-state coolers could efficiently and quietly eliminate heat from, say, integrated-circuit boards, enabling smaller, faster computers.

Engineers have long known of so-called electrocaloric substances that drop in temperature when an external electric field is withdrawn, but the amount of chilling either was too small at practical temperatures or occurred at too high a temperature to be useful. Effective chip cooling, for instance, requires reductions of at least 10 de- grees C from typical operating temperatures¿about 85 degrees C, says G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive offi cer at VLSI Research, a microelectronics industry market research firm in Santa Clara, Calif. Computers usually require heat sinks, radiators, fans, heat pipes or even fl uid-based heat pumps to extract the surplus degrees.