Water cooled heat sinks

Is there any such thing that exist?

What happens when it leaks? How many people will actually clean it out and refill it correctly, as needed? I'm thinking nobody in their right mind would do it on anything small enough for one person to carry, set up, and use.

If it does exist, I'd stay away from it, because it's such a violation of KISS.

Heatpipes could be beneficial, though, for especially high-power torches.

I would think forced airflow over the heatsink would be more effective like a small computer cpu or graphical card cpu fan heatsink. They can be very light and quiet. However like any electric motor, it is going to draw some runtime off your power supply.

I was kind of hoping the ion drag pump would've been perfected by now; short of that, nobody wants to carry around a container of water to get some light.

skeeterbait said:

I would think forced airflow over the heatsink would be more effective like a small computer cpu or graphical card cpu fan heatsink. They can be very light and quiet. However like any electric motor, it is going to draw some runtime off your power supply.

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With little enough air in the system, the liquid should be enough to move the heat. In fact, some people have done just that with water cooling computers: no pumps or fans, just a radiator, and thermal expansion and contraction giving a pumping effect. What you get with liquid/vapor is the ability to actually move the heat, so that a short thermal path to the liquid/vapor gets around common dissipation inefficiencies.

You could put a radiator at the rear of the body, for instance, and be able to handle quite a bit more heat than with a large metal slug directly attached to the emitters, just due to reduction of thermal gradient and thermal mass near the heat source. Given that the water must be able to expand and contract, however, and that getting a perfect sterile sealed environment and mixture will be difficult, a heatpipe would offer most of the performance advantage, while being a truly sealed, no fuss, heat transfer mechanism.

I tried this design already. The exposed heatsink did not fair well. The problem still lies in trying to disperse the heat away from the emitter and the copper CPU heatsink did so. However, the copper did not have much place to transfer heat to besides air and water that ran through it. IIRC, air is a horrible heat reduction if the source keeps producing heat. Water worked well but you still need to constantly run a water flow through it.

It's just not practical to constantly blow into the heatsink or run water through it every few seconds. "IF" you can manage to run a fan into the system like 47's XM18 did, the heat will stabilize. You'd still be drawing power from your batteries though.

Dive lights do a good job of utilizing water cooling.
IMO water cooling is overkill, if you think about PCs water cooling loops are really only used for GPUs or CPUs with massive power consumption in the hundreds of watts.

Can you imagine going down the road with say a high powered Nitecore EA4 with a water tank strapped to your back,the men in white suits would be chasing you with a mental health warrant.:devil:

I suspect that there are more problems than answers with using water to cool a flashlight. The extra cost of parts and machining seem the most obvious. If one factors into the equation the extra complexity of ensuring that such a system would have to be sealed for life and resistant to corrosion plus accidental damage one would ask what benefits could be derived?

Given that several manufacturers have now brought to market small hand held search lights which emit two to three thousand lumens using nothing more than a smallish heatsink and passive cooling is there a demand for better cooling?

dougie said:

I suspect that there are more problems than answers with using water to cool a flashlight. The extra cost of parts and machining seem the most obvious. If one factors into the equation the extra complexity of ensuring that such a system would have to be sealed for life and resistant to corrosion plus accidental damage one would ask what benefits could be derived?

Given that several manufacturers have now brought to market small hand held search lights which emit two to three thousand lumens using nothing more than a smallish heatsink and passive cooling is there a demand for better cooling?

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After reading your reply and thinking about it more,I think it would be cost prohibitive.If you looked to fan cooling like inside a computer would pose the same problems due to size and costs.I suppose one day we might have nano fans

Someone did diy a water cooled XM-L array mountain bike like, http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?344877-49-XM-L-U2-40-000lm-watercooled-bike-lamp . edit: the in-use shots start at around 3:50, the auto-exposure on the camera also makes the light look not as bright as it really is.

Water cooling can be appropriate for specialty search lights that use short-arc xenon lamps.

Yep, i'm pretty sure projector lamps in cinemas use water cooling.

Watercooling wouldn't be a great option in portable lights, as it uses up lot of the battery, adds a lot of weight and bulk and can be fragile.