ESA, boiling effeciently gets rid of excess heat

[southwestforests]

Somewhere in this from the ESA is a connection between laptops and boiling that I am not getting, https://flic.kr/p/2kjjNA7 And I say that while sitting here using a laptop & not at all succeeding in imagining how boiling could be part of it.

"The experiment is also installed with an electrode to observe the effect of an electric field on the bubbles, enabling scientists to observe and quantify the effect of external forces.

“Boiling is an extremely efficient way of getting rid of excess heat. This research could therefore provide very valuable information for improving the thermal management systems in space as well as in terrestrial applications,” says ESA project scientist Daniele Mangini.

With this insight and more accurate calculations of the boiling process, products such as laptops can be improved and made more compact."

But in my non-Starfire sci-fi story the ships sometimes do use boiling coolant liquid to offload heat.

[Cralis]

It's pretty clear that the author did a poor job summarizing what he read, or maybe didn't understand it. Boiling is essentially transferring large quantities of heat by causing a phase transition from liquid to gas. That moves the heat from one place to another pretty quickly, but it doesn't cause the heat to disappear. You still have to cool down the coolant liquid, but perhaps that can be done by another process? I'm not an expert, but my understanding was that you didn't want your coolant to phase transition because then it couldn't do its job...

My guess on the laptops would be for liquid cooled laptops. But you're right, it's really unclear from the article.

[krenshala]

The majority of recent notebook computers have closed system liquid cooling (heatsink on the processor/part to be cooled) with pipes to a radiator (which may or may not have a fan attached) to dissipate the heat into the air. For those you almost always want your coolant to not go through a phase change, though the reason varies depending on the type of coolant and what its contained in.