Some of you are probably aware that I've been working on a new waterblock which I've nick-named the "Cascade". The design has already gone through a few months of research, and about a month's worth of tweaking actual materials, and it's getting pretty close to the final phase.
The block's principles are based on ideas drawn from myself, BigBen2K, Volenti, and jaydee116 (aka CustomCooledPC), and this is my vision on how the ideas can be brought to a physical reality.
The block works by water entering the middle barb into a manifold cavity that distributes the water flow out to the jet tube entrances. The jet tubes accelerate the water to around 4x the entrance velocity. Water travels down each jet tubes and is pushed directly down the middle of a "cup" (one for each tube) drilled into the copper base-plate. The jets impinge on the base-plate, creating a highly efficienct stagnation region of thermal transfer.
Now with jet impingement the further you get away from the middle the jet, the less the cooling effect. Other people have tried jet arrays, but the flow coming off from surrounding jets interferes with the efficiency of each jet, and while free jet arrays are more efficient than a single jet, they can be improved upon.
Enter the cup. The cups are very closely spaced together. They are wide enough to allow each jet's primary stagnation region to form. The cups are also jet wide enough that the water flowing off the main impingement jet strikes the cup walls at close to the same velocity as the jet stream itself. This creates a secondary impingement effect right at the base of the cup walls. This effect is occurring right where we want it, and it soaks up the heat that would otherwise attempt to go up the copper walls between the cups.
The jet tubes are submersed into each cup slightly. This shields the jet streams from the out-flow of surrounding jets, and helps to guide the water out of the cup without interfering too much with the jet stream coming down.
The optimal width of the cups is directly linked to the width of the jets, and the height of the jets above the base-plate is also very important, as is the thickness of the base-plate, and the proximity of each cup to each other.
The pictures below are of the Rev 2 version of the Cascade design. The current block has two outlets but I'm investigating whether nor not having just a single outlet (ie. two barbs instead of three) causes any performance loss. If there's no performance loss, I'll make it a traditional two-barb block.
The design packs 52 jet tubes into a very small area. I've included a USA "dime" and an Australian 5c piece in the pictures for an idea of scale.
I also snapped some pictures of the jet tubes in action without the base-plate using an Eheim 1048, and a close-up of the assembled block which is intended to highlight that the jet tubes actually do go some way into the cup holes.
How's it perform you ask? I'm seeing a full 2.0C clear lead over the best result I had previously gotten with the White Water over 12 mounts of that block. This is using a T'Bred B at 2400MHz/1.85v running BurnK7. This is significant because it was my design goal to gain a full 2C, and secondly, it's just the first time I've mounted the block. History tells me that I rarely get it right first time, so there may be a little bit more hiding there as I remount to test again.
All up I'm very proud of the design and am very pleased to see it come together as a physical reality.
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This is not a Lime tree
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