Gadgetory

Iran we are here in the Corsair validation facilities I'm joined by Bobby Ken Stahl and Bobby what what do you do here what do you know about this stuff so I'm the thermal engineer here at Corsair I design all the cooling systems that includes fans liquid coolers heat sinks I consult air flow anything that involves heat transfer or cooling and the first machine or setup I want to talk about is the thermal chamber so in this room which you'll see some of this in a moment but there's a wind tunnel for fan testing thermal chamber there's a chromis chromis setup for power supply testing with this let's let's just talk about the very basics of a thermal chamber so we've we've already said why you would want one in previous content but what are some of the different types of chambers available like humidity temperature control right okay so basically a thermal chamber is a heater or refrigerator in a highly insulated box so you set the temperature that you want on here and that can be a high temperature or low temperature for whatever you're trying to test for and then it maintains that temperature some of them are programmable so that they can go through different temperature ranges these are basic temperature only chambers but they also make humidity control chambers and some chambers with liquid nitrogen for extreme cooling some chambers have shock and vibration tables in them for extreme vibration that sort of thing some have dry air injection so they can get to extremely low humidities or extreme temperature conditions but for this industry temperature only seems to do the job just fine so in in what use case would you want humidity control for a thermal chamber if you were building products for a very highly humid environment like Southeast Asia or you're concerned about corrosion or delamination every circuit boards for example then you would definitely want a humidity chamber we do that kind of testing just not at this facility and we were talking just before shooting this video about humidity and how it impacts the heat capacity of there so that's let's run through that again for viewers sure the more humidity is in the air the more heat the air can carry per unit of volume and that's because the air density increases so if you have a cubic foot of air at 20 percent humidity you're gonna be able to carry a little bit less heat than a cubic foot of air at 80% humidity I'm so in that regard even though high humidity is very uncomfortable for us people that actually helps the computer carry heat better you got it and this chamber here what what are I guess you test your coolers cases in here what's the how do you deploy the chamber yeah we put in these wires shelfs that are up here on top we can put a computer in here or just a power supply or just a cooler I can show you in the next chamber over we have a setup for testing processors who's thinking called a thermal test vehicle which is an actual processor made by Intel and it goes into an actual processor socket and has the same mounting as a heatsink you can attach a heatsink to it and then the wires come out of this thing goes to a power supply and you turn it up and it's eater it's just a teeter chip it doesn't actually compute and then I can say I want a hundred watts and then I can measure the temperature at the top of the die and it's temperature differential and then calculate how well the heat sink is working all right so you can basically simulate a CPU because you can set the the wattage I guess they simulate the higher TDP authority to me chips exactly compiling whatever power level I want so that's pretty cool okay so we've moved camera shots this is what we were just talking about so can you walk me through this all right this is an intel thermal test vehicle for songket 2011 processor it has a socket 2011 sized CPU device here has a heater built into it the heater is the same size as the microprocessor in real life so it has the same heat flux per square millimeter as a real processor this little line right here on top is a thermocouple that's embedded in there that allows me to measure the temperature at the very top of the package I can measure the temperature of the heat sink or I can measure the temperature of the ambient and then calculate the effectiveness of the heat sink and his performance in degree C per watt I know how much power I put into it by running it with my DC power supply over here so know exactly how much power is going in you know exactly how much he's coming out and then I can have very good idea on the performance of the thermal system so for this program will DC power supply what can you tell me so as the name suggests it's a DC power supply I can set it to output any voltage that I want it has current limits for safety but what makes this very special isn't that it's programmable because it has highly accurate metering built into it so I can say you know we've got four digits of precision on voltage and current so I have a very very good idea how much power is going into it it cares so much that it actually measures the voltage at the ttv not at the terminals here so it compensates for the voltage drop through the wire cool okay so now we are in front of the wind tunnel let's start with the report that you have on screen what's what are we looking at here okay what we're looking at here is the actual wind tunnel report for the Corsair ML 120 blue LED fan these lines here each line represents the pressure and flow at a particular point so this axis is pressure this axis is flow the maximum pressure respect that you see on the box is always measured at zero flow wind tunnel closes itself completely runs the fan at a speed measures the pressure at this location and then plots that point here this point is not useful to system designers other than to just have some way of comparing the system because this doesn't occur in real life if you have zero flow it's not doing good for you at all the wind tunnel begins by opening valves inside here and allowing some air to flow from first chamber into second chamber and that reduces the static pressure and the flow increases so as that happens the next data point is here and then it opens up some more in here and here and here and it works its way all the way down until the pressure here equals atmospheric pressure and that is the zero resistance point or maximum flow which is the other spectate see on the box this also doesn't occur in reality because if you don't have any resistance there's nothing in the way of your fan in reality your system will be somewhere in between these points and you can plot a resistance curve for say like a radiator and that curve will go up in this direction and where those two curves intersect is the actual pressure and flow that you will receive when you combine those elements in a system that's actually the really useful information so each one of these lines is a different speed there's a hundred percent 90 percent eighty percent and so on all the way down to 20 percent the horizontal lines here are the fans rpm achievement this is the fans rpm and so this blue line corresponds with this orange kind of peach colored line pants green line with this purple line etc and shows the RPMs over here as you can see this fan is very stable regardless the amount of resistance it receives it doesn't really fluctuate in speed very much and that so that's the rapport you get after using it mechanically let's like ass walk from this end to that and what's going on inside of the wind tunnel so let's back up just a smidge here's the plate where we mount the device to be tested a fan or radiator I've even hooked up whole cases to this thing and measured flow resistance in cases this ring right here is attached to four pressure taps this is the static pressure sensor measures this in relationship to atmospheric pressure outside of the room inside here there are several screens those are to diffuse the flow so that the air flows at the same speed through the entire diameter the wind tunnel that's necessary for the calculations because the math makes certain assumptions about the dimer of the wind tunnel and how fast the air is flowing these two pressure taps here are differential they're measured against each other and this is the high site pressure this is the low side pressure in this pleat here in the middle there's a series of valves that start out about half an inch in diameter and go all the way up to several inches in diameter and it can open one or more valves depending on the type of test that it's doing this chart here actually shows the smallest valves eight millimeters in diameter and the largest is 42 but in this 32 plus 42 and all and it tells you to CFM range for whatever combination of Alps you have open at that time so when measuring the differential pressure across here and knowing the exact diameter of the valve it knows the barometric pressure and it knows the temperature in community the air calculates the air density can then calculate the exact CFM flowing through the system this chamber has a couple more screens in it to equalize the flow and then that tube goes out to a big fan right there that's the counter blower this is necessary because the wind tunnel itself has significant air flow resistance and so it actually pulls a vacuum in this chamber in order to get the flow that it needs to achieve in the first chamber this chamber often operates below atmospheric pressure that's normal so in order to get to eat this chamber at this point here to equal atmospheric pressure this chamber here has to be significantly below atmospheric pressure very cool then wrapping it all back to the end product this is the the numbers that come up on the box at the end of the day come up in the new I expects sheet comes from something like this I guess that's correct all the published specifications for all of our fan products come out of this machine this machine costs about seventy-five thousand dollars and once year I fly a guy out from Taiwan to come calibrate it his calibration reports are NIST traceable and you can actually go up in the National Institute of Standards website and look it up so I am very confident in the numbers and performance data that comes out of this machine so for more information as always link in the description below we'll have an article with more information Thank You Bobbi for joining me it's really we'll see you all next time you