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Originally Posted by XeroHouR you can't base how much heat your water system can take based off the heat that your rad can supposedly dissipate either I assume? |
Not on its own. It's all about thermal resistance. Basically, the more heat you push into the radiator, the hotter it will get, all things being the same. Now, I don't know the exact relationship, so I can't even begin to guess at how much hotter the radiator would be. The big gotcha here is that the peltier is a heat pump. The amount of heat it can pump is strongly dependant on the delta (or difference) between the cold side and the hot side. The bigger the difference, the harder it is to pump heat across the gap. This is exactly the same sort of idea as a water pump and the back pressure. If there's a lot of back pressure against the pump, it can't pump very much water, as it's spending most of it's energy 'fighting' the pressure. So, ideally, you want your radiator to be as close to ambient as possible.
The bad news on this front is that radiators get less efficient the closer they are to ambient. Radiators have a log relationship - the hotter they are compared to ambient, the more heat they can shift. Unfortunately, this is the opposite situation of the peltier!
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Originally Posted by XeroHouR Say that the upper surface has basically no limit to the heat it can dissipate(just for the what if factor), the heatpipes would have a limit to how much they could carry away right? And I'm guessing that limit is right around what a really good heatsink could do?(on average for the heatpipes that are actually used) |
Like everything, the heatpipe does have a limit to how much heat you can push along it. However, this depends on the fluid inside the pipe, the width of the pipe, the construction of the wick (Technically, heatpipes work in any orientation due to the wick. Thermosyphons have to be placed the right way up) and a whole bunch of other things. I know of heat pipes that are designed to move 1200W with a delta T of 20C. You will always have a temperature gradient when you've moving heat - it's just a fact of life.
If you actually use water, then your heat pipe won't really move any heat until the hot end is at 30C. If you want it to start moving heat before that, you need to switch to a different working fluid, such as ammonia.
There is a lot of information about heatpipes on the internet - Google is your friend!