Heat Shock and its effect on laptop

Drug Lords

Near to the end of the tournament, I have achieved out of the unranked, to the 448 of the ranking. This is still not into the top 100. What are the people in the 100 do? Do they plays very often? I plays everyday, yet I still cannot get to the top 100.

Heat shock

Thermal shock, are a phenomenon caused by heat and cooling. They are an underlying danger to computers. Computers nowadays are getting smaller and smaller, and the size of the silicone are getting more compact. With this, they will produces more heat, because the clocking are running faster and causes a lot fo switching and small pico arcing during switching.

In laptop, when it is switched on, the ventilation will run, and cools the processor down. And this is what is normally doing. Try not to switch from one place to another often, because rapid changes in temperature can causes thermal shock to the semiconductors. When the chips are heating up, the material will expand, and if it is suddenly cooled, it will contract, and if the rate of cooling is too fast, it will create a crack. Cracks in semiconductor are a nightmare to people who do troubleshooting. This is because just a small crack of 1 micron, there will be no link between one processor to another processor, render the communication fail. In this case, it will create faults, and reduces the speed as the processor automatically have to switch the error from one destination to another.

For laptop, thermal shock will occurs in this scenario. When you switches off the laptop. Did you know that once you switches off the laptop, the ventilation fan will stopped running, and internally, the heat temperature continues to rise, because of resident heat? Where resident heat continues to say in the laptop, temperature continues to rises after the laptop is switched off. Thus, the material will continue to expand, and after some time, when heat is dissipated into the surrounding environment, it will contract again.

This is one theory that I derive from this principle. Create another offline from laptop power supply, and run a small fan square type fan low voltage, with an adaptor. I uses a 12VDC miniature fan, and plug it to the power-point. And put at the exhaust outlet of the ventilation. As the Laptop ventilation fan blows, the small fan will draws the air out of the ventilation slot, and push it to the environment out fast, so that even when the ventilation fan of the laptop ceased working, there is still another fan running.


After switching off the laptop, allows the small fan to run at least 10 minutes after switching off. This is to ensure that the small ventilation fan continues to run, and remove the resident heat. This also helps to reduces greatly the chance of thermal shock occurring.

If you are using laptop cooler, those platform type of fan cooler in any computer shop, the chance of the laptop getting a thermal shock is even greater. Picture this, you are running in an aircon room, running hard. And after running, instead of hitting the shower, you quickly change to your normal attire, and leaves, and walk into the street in summer. How would you feel? Would you prefer to change immediately to the attire and walk into the street, or you stay in the aircon room and leaves after you have cooled down?

This is the same principle for thermal shock faced by the laptop. When you run the laptop under a laptop cooler, and because it is USB powered, the moment you switches off the laptop, the heat will still continue to generate because of resident heat in the processors and the chips. Although they are small, but because the ventilation fan is also stopped, the heat will build up in the RAM, and internal part of the laptop. Overtime, it may expand up to cracking.

So one way, is to uses another small fan running external power, to cools down the fan, just as a jogger cools himself down after a hard work of training.


This ia an extract from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_shock. It explains about thermal shock in the material.

Thermal shock is the name given to cracking as a result of rapid temperature change. Glass and ceramic objects are particularly vulnerable to this form of failure, due to their low toughness, low thermal conductivity, and high thermal expansion coefficients. However, they are used in many high temperature applications due to their high melting point.

Thermal shock occurs when a thermal gradient causes different parts of an object to expand by different amounts. This differential expansion can be understood in terms of stress or of strain, equivalently. At some point, this stress overcomes the strength of the material, causing a crack to form. If nothing stops this crack from propagating through the material, it will cause the object's structure to fail