Fanless cooling

If you find yourself in the middle of dust, dirt and moisture, at least you don’t want to soak up the stuff. But that’s exactly what normal PCs do with their fans. For cooling the central processing unit CPU in particular, one or more fans suck ambient air, including dust particles, water vapor and the finest mist, into the housing and guide them past the parts to be cooled.

Past? Most of it is transported outside again. But the rest settles on the PC components, “multiplies” in the quiet zones – and sooner or later can put the computer out of action. The fans themselves are most at risk. Dirty fans do not cool sufficiently and the PC – hopefully – turns itself off.

Moisture can cause a short connection in a location on the PC that is often difficult to locate. However, the consequence of moisture is often less spectacular, but fatal in the long term: it promotes metallic oxidation. Corrosion, as the non-chemist says, can literally eat up parts of a PC.

For this reason, no fans are installed in most industrial PCs. Cooling is usually carried out using cooling fins made of heat-conducting aluminum. This design distinguishes industrial PC visually from office PC. And also acoustically, as mentioned at the beginning.

Cooling by heat conduction instead of convection is also a design requirement for a special form of industrial PC. Namely for devices that are hermetically sealed against any environmental contact. In extreme cases, they even run under water.