Japanese tech giant Fujitsu Ltd. has hit upon a novel way to cool down smartphones that it says is five times as effective as metal and graphite sheets.

As most smartphone users will appreciate, one of the problems associated with ever-more powerful devices is that they tend to get extremely hot when they’re being used, especially when you’re running multiple apps at the same time. The experience can be an uncomfortable one for users, and it can also degrade the phone itself over time.

Fujitsu says the conventional method to dispel heat is to pack sheets of metal or graphite with high thermal conductivity into smartphones, but the problem is they’re barely adequate. And so the company has hit upon the idea of a “Liquid Loop Cooling” system that pumps coolant around the smartphone’s motherboard, in order to draw away heat faster.

Fujitsu describes the contraption as the world’s “first loop heat pipe less than 1 millimeter thick.” It looks just like a thin piece of metal, as seen in the image below, but it’s far more cunning than that. Here’s how it works:

“A loop heat pipe is a heat-transfer device that consists of an evaporator that absorbs heat from the heat source and a condenser that dissipates that heat away, with the two components connected by pipes into a loop. A working fluid is encapsulated inside this closed loop as a coolant. The heat from the heat source evaporates the coolant, and the energy that goes into evaporating the coolant is taken away from the heat source, lowering its temperature. It is based off of the same principle used when sprinkling water on pavement to reduce heat.”

The main benefit of this technology is it’ll give developers “freedom when designing mobile devices because the patterning is performed by etching metal sheets, meaning that the pipe layout and the amount of heat transferred can be customized for each device.”.

Which means Fujitsu is probably eyeing up other kinds of devices besides smartphones and tablets, such as medical equipment, IoT sensors and wearables to name just a few. The company says it should have a useable version of its techology up and running by 2017.

Image credit: LoggaWiggler via Pixabay.com