Samsung Galaxy Note9’s Water Carbon Cooling System and the quest for week-long battery life

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:

1. Sluggish gameplay
2. 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.