Science Fair

The Hillsboro-Beaverton High School Science Fair was today. John came up with the idea of building an alcohol cooler for a CPU, basically a heat pipe. You put some liquid in a metal tube and seal it. You heat the lower end of the tube, the liquid evaporates, rises to the upper and cooler end of the tube, condenses back to liquid and runs back down to the bottom. The evaporation and condensation transfer a relatively large amount of heat energy. He got a couple of his friends to go in on this project with him. He got the idea from reading on some forums on the Internet about overclocking CPU's. He had a rough idea on what he wanted to do. I did some calculations and realized we were going to need a much bigger tube than we originally planned. We made a couple of trips to Home Depot for some copper pipe and fittings and started putting this thing together. I tried to stay out of the actual construction. I made some suggestions, but John and his friends did all the measuring, marking, cutting, drilling and assembly. Soldering was a joint effort. John ran the torch, one of his friends would hold the pipe using a pair channel-locks, and I applied the flux and solder. Eventually we got the whole thing put together. It stands about four feet tall, but it does not work. We used the BIOS to monitor the temperature and the CPU gets to 60 degrees Celsius in something less than 10 minutes, whereupon we shut it down. The problem is that the boiling point of alcohol is too high. There are a couple of things we could try to make it work, and maybe we will one of these days.

Today was the Science Fair. We had a very short time to view the projects, less than an hour. I only got to look at a handful. Then we had the awards ceremony. It went on for an hour. They must have given out a hundred awards. They had awards for everything under the sun.

They opened the awards ceremony with awards from the Military. I was a little taken aback that the military was there, but as the Navy man said, many of the inventions we now take for granted came from military research. Nothing like a good fight to stir people's creativity. Each branch of the service has their own research department, and they all gave out awards.

John and his friends got the people's choice award. All the other participants voted for their favorite project, and John and his friends won, even though their contraption did not work.