Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

260 Текст 5. Plastic Coolers Getting a bigger chill out of polymers that respond to electric fields By Steven Ashley , November , 2008 . P . 14-15 Whether they sit in your kitchen or inside your personal com- puter, refrigerators and other cooling devices are typically bulky, often noisy and frequently power-hungry. A team at Pennsylvania State Uni- versity recently found that certain plastics cool off a significant amount – 12 degrees Celsius – when an applied electric field is removed. Should the technique become feasible, the resulting solid-state coolers could efficiently and quietly eliminate heat from, say, integrated-circuit boards, enabling smaller, faster computers. Engineers have long known of so-called electrocaloric substances that drop in temperature when an external electric field is withdrawn, but the amount of chilling either was too small at practical temperatures or occurred at too high a temperature to be useful. Effective chip cool- ing, for instance, requires reductions of at least 10 degrees С from typical operating temperatures – about 85 degrees C, says G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive officer at VLSI Research, a microelectronics industry market research firm in Santa Clara, Calif. Computers usually require heat sinks, radiators, fans, heat pipes or even fluid-based heat pumps to extract the surplus degrees. If successful, the new technology should be compact and at least 10 times more energy-efficient than conventional cooling techniques, according to Penn State electrical engineer Qiming Zhang, who led the team. The group found that a micron-thick film of a poly vinylidene fluoride co-polymer – polyvinylidene fluoride trifluoroethylene – heats up a dozen degrees С when zapped with 120 volts at ambient tempera- tures as low as 55 degrees C. Such a rise constitutes an order of magni- tude improvement over other electrocaloric materials (mostly ceramics) at that temperature range Zhang, who in the past worked on plastic "ar- tificial muscles" that alter shape under electric fields, says that years ago he "started thinking about melting ice into water, which is one of