Keeping Smartphones Cool With Gallium Phase Change Material

With many emerging capabilities in pervasive computing, internet access, wireless communication, and data processing, the smartphone with high central processing unit (CPU) frequency is achieving extremely high running speed which also brings about discomfort to the users due to huge heat released. Here, an automatic temperature regulation strategy using low melting point metal gallium to absorb transitory heat was proposed for the first time. Experiments demonstrate that 3.4125 ml gallium would maintain the module below 45 degrees C for 16 min at 2.832 W. Such temperature holding time was longer than most of the conventional phase change materials (PCMs). Moreover, some interesting phase change phenomena were also discovered such that mixing SiO2 powder with gallium or just shaking the liquid metal container will help reduce the large supercooling of gallium which is beneficial for the material to quickly recover to its original service state again. The method is expected to be very useful and efficient in maintaining thermal comfort of many handheld electronics, especially for the burgeoning smartphones and panel personal computer (PPC).