Powered
by faster chips, beefy graphics cards, and enough RAM to game like a
console, modern smartphones have become more like laptops in our
pockets.
Designed
for those that want to do more, the Galaxy Note9 pushes the envelope
further, featuring the latest and greatest chip sets, up to 8GB RAM,
and a 4,000mAh battery as detailed in my Geezam
article
entitled
“Samsung
Galaxy Note 9 is For Those Who Want the Galaxy and Beyond”.
But
with all that power under the hood it takes some engineering magic to
make sure that all the components stay cool while you’re gaming or
doing some intense multitasking.
Samsung
has innovated smartphone cooling on the Galaxy Note9 with its all-new
Water Carbon Cooling system. Water cooling first debuted on the
Galaxy S7.
The
Galaxy Note9 improves both the capacity and efficiency of smartphone
cooling. So how did they make it happen?
Samsung
Note 9 - The thermal throttling problem
The
problem is that making phones with batteries that can last all day
and play console-quality games comes at a cost: heat.
When
a phone’s internals become too hot, the CPU slows down. This a
problem known as thermal throttling which leads to a loss in
performance.
Thus
a good cooling system addresses the following problems:
-
Sluggish gameplay
-
Poor multi-tasking
The
Galaxy Note9 had an ambitious set of goals. Samsung wanted to create
a phone with a battery that could last all day, provide a PC-like
experience with Samsung DeX as noted in “Samsung
DeX Offers Linux on Galaxy and Productivity on the Go”,
and handle graphic-intense games like Fortnite.
This
means putting in a 4,000mAh battery and the latest 2.7GHz mobile
processor, which would challenge the phone’s performance. Thus the
new cooling system needed to be both faster and more efficient than
previous generations.
Samsung's
solution to thermal throttling - Water Carbon Cooling
When
Samsung had launched the Galaxy S7, they'd introduced a new type of
water-based cooling into our phones.
It
used a porous thermal spreader filled with water, which absorbed the
heat and turned into steam and then carried the heat away through a
pipe. Once the heat dissipated, the steam condensed into water again.
This
system was the blueprint for the Water Carbon Cooling system in the
Galaxy Note9, but bigger and more efficient.
The
most difficult part of improving the cooling system was to make it
more efficient. The original system was thin and used two Thermal
Interface Materials (TIM), one made of highly conductive carbon
fiber, to transfer heat away from the processor. This takes advantage
of the face that graphite and diamond are very good non-metallic
conductors of heat.
Samsung's
solution was to add a layer of copper between the two TIMs, making it
possible to transfer more heat between the two materials for more
efficient heat dissipation. Samsung also engineered a wider thermal
spreading pipe, coming in at 350mm3 compared to the Galaxy
S9’s 95mm3, to dissipate heat over a wider surface area.
Samsung's
long-term goal - Batteries that last for weeks, not days
Thanks
to the improved Water Carbon Cooling system, the Galaxy Note9 can
effectively manage heat generated from its powerful processor. With
the wider thermal spreader and enhanced Carbon Fiber interface, the
cooling system conducts and transmits heat efficiently to the surface
of the device
This
allows the Galaxy Note9 to operate at peak performance consistently.
When compared to the Galaxy Note8, the upgraded cooling system’s
heat absorption is three times greater and the thermal conductivity
is 3.5 times higher.
Water
Carbon Cooling is an innovative solution to a problem involving
battery performance. Hopefully in the future they will have Hydrogen
fuel cell batteries as described in my blog article entitled “How
Intelligent Energy Hydrogen Fuel Cell can give Apple products weeks
of battery life by 2017”
that will make batteries last an entire week or even months.
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