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<\/a>Samsung has been using vapor chambers in phones for almost a decade, relying on them to keep thermal throttling to a minimum. Credit: Samsung<\/p>\nThus far, smartphones have largely avoided heating issues in two ways. Firstly, by using low-power chipsets that simply don\u2019t generate a lot of heat in the first place. Secondly, by thermally coupling the main chips to metal heat spreaders and sometimes the smartphone\u2019s external housing, to effectively create a simple heatsink. However, smartphones continue to grow more powerful, generating more heat during demanding tasks like recording high-resolution video. Thus, engineers have had to find new ways to dump greater amounts of heat without compromising the aesthetics and usability of their devices.<\/p>\n
Enter vapor chamber cooling. Picture a sealed metal cavity built into a smartphone, inside which is a small amount of water-based coolant. The phone\u2019s chipset is thermally coupled to the cavity, such that the heat is absorbed by the coolant inside. Thanks to the physical properties of water, notably its huge specific heat value, it\u2019s able to absorb a great deal of heat energy, particularly as it passes through the phase-change regime as the fluid turns from a liquid into a gas. As it heats up and vaporizes, the coolant spreads to fill the entire cavity, spreading the heat into the whole thermal mass of the casing where it can be released into the surroundings. As heat is released, the vapor cools back into a liquid, and the cycle can begin again. The idea is exactly the same as is used in heat pipes<\/a>\u2014where a liquid is heated beyond its phase change point into a vapor, and used to spread heat to other areas of a sealed cavity.<\/p>\n