How Does the Water Carbon Cooling System Prevent Galaxy Note9 from Heating Up?

The Samsung Galaxy Note9 is remarkably designed for those who want to do more and get more in a smartphone. It is powered by faster chips, robust graphics cards, and enough RAM to game like a console. It is more of a laptop in your pocket than a phone.

The Note9 pushes the envelope further, featuring the latest and greatest chipsets, up to 8GB RAM, and a 4,000mAh battery.

But with all that power under the hood, it takes some engineering magic to make sure that all the components stay cool while you’re gaming or doing some intense multitasking. Samsung has innovated smartphone cooling on the Galaxy Note9 with its all-new Water Carbon Cooling system.

“The Note9 is a game changer in many ways. It’s packed with power that will undoubtedly give South Africans the freedom to accomplish more and do it effortlessly,” says Charles Kimari, Head of Mobile Division at Samsung Electronics.

The system, which first debuted on the Galaxy S7, has been improved in terms of capacity and efficiency in the Galaxy Note9. So how was this made possible?

Making phones with batteries that can last all day and play console-quality games comes at a cost; heat. When a phone’s internals become too hot, the CPU slows down – a problem known as thermal throttling – and leads to a loss in performance.

Sluggish gameplay and poor multi-tasking are two major problems that a good cooling system addresses.

The Galaxy Note9 accomplishes the ambitious set of goals it had; a battery that could last all day, provide a PC-like experience with Samsung DeX and handle graphic-intense games like Fortnite.

It features a 4,000mAh battery and the latest 2.7GHz mobile processor, which would have challenged the phone’s performance. This called for the new cooling system to be both faster and more efficient than previous generations.

When the Galaxy S7 was launched it came with a new type of water-based in-phone based cooling system. It used a porous thermal spreader filled with water, which absorbed the heat and turned into steam and then carried the heat away through a pipe.

Once the heat dissipated, the steam condensed into water again. This system was the blueprint for the Water Carbon Cooling system.

The most difficult part of improving the cooling system was to make it more efficient. The original system was thin and used two Thermal Interface Materials (TIM), one made of highly conductive carbon fiber, to transfer heat away from the processor.

The answer was to add a layer of copper between the two TIMs, making it possible to transfer more heat between the two materials for more efficient heat dissipation. The thermal spreading pipe was also made wider, coming in at 350mm3 compared to the Galaxy S9’s 95mm3, to dissipate heat over a wider surface area.

Thanks to the improved Water Carbon Cooling system, the Galaxy Note9 can effectively manage heat generated from its powerful processor. With the wider thermal spreader and enhanced Carbon Fiber interface, the cooling system conducts and transmits heat efficiently to the surface of the device, allowing the Galaxy Note9 to operate at peak performance consistently. When compared to the Galaxy Note8, the upgraded cooling system’s heat absorption is three times greater and the thermal conductivity is 3.5 times higher.