Step 1 - Heat Source Identification

The first step was to determine where the majority of heat gets generated by the majority of laptops. They did this by taking thermal image maps of a number of different laptops. For most laptops, the heat was concentrated on the bottom-middle of the laptop near the front (closest to the screen). It's no surprise that most of the heat is concentrated near the processor and that the faster the processor, the hotter the laptop. A typical thermal map is show here; the colors indicate different temperature ranges.The red/orange shows the hottest location and blue/purple identifies the spots that are the coolest.

Step 2 - Heat Removal Through Conduction

The fastest and surest way to transport heat away from the source is by using thermal conduction. So our engineers looked at what materials would perform this heat transport most quickly. As it turns out aluminum is at the top of the list in terms of thermal conductivity, 5 times higher than stainless steel and 8,000 times higher than air. Because of this incredibly high thermal conductivity, a device made from aluminum can pull heat away form the hot source and quickly lower the temperature of the laptop. In our case the legs of the LaptopProp quickly become quite warm while cooling the laptop.

You'll notice that after using your laptop with a LaptopProp how warm the LaptopProp becomes, it's amazing.

Step 3 - Cooling the LaptopProp Using its Large Surface Area

In order for the LaptopProp to continue pulling the heat out of the laptop, it needs to continually cool itself. This is accomplished through convective cooling with air (which we will talk more about next). The problem is that air isn't very conductive, so our engineers needed to come up with some tricks to optimize this cooling. They accomplished this, in part, by maximizing the effective cooling area - you can double the cooling effect by doubling the surface area. You will notice that the LaptopProp's design increases the effective cooling surface area by more than a factor of 2.6 times. The table to the right shows the cooling area of a typical laptop both with and without a LaptopProp. As you can see the advantage a LaptopProp affords is significant. Oh by the way, we didn't invent this trick, it's why elephants have large ears - to increase their "cooling area" otherwise they would overheat too.

Step 4 - Natural Convective Cooling

This is the part that's really amazing and makes the LaptopProp a fantastic product. Our engineers optimized the design so that it would perform and function as though it had a fan system even though it doesn't. We would have installed fans if they were needed to cool the system, but we didn't have to due to great design insight. Rather than using fans, they looked to harness the forces associated with just how much hot air wants to rise - the hot air flows out of the "exhaust ports" and draws in cool air (these are the same forces that make smoke rise so fast above a fire and makes hot air balloons fly (powerful stuff). And what makes this process even better, is that the warmer the system gets the faster the air rises and harder it works to cool itself - it's like a thermally controlled variable speed fan, but without noisy fans and electricity. Take a look at the diagram above to better understand how the system works.

As you can see this is a pretty amazing little product - There's much more to it than meets the eye. There are quite a few secondary benefits associated with this product as well.