OnePlus today announced the OnePlus 11 Concept smartphone that the company has been teasing for the past few weeks. The device is not intended to start production, but is designed to showcase the company’s new Active CryoFlux cooling solution.
Active CryoFlux is a fancy term for what is essentially the kind of closed-loop liquid cooling system found in desktop PCs, but drastically miniaturized for smartphones.
At the heart of the system is a ceramic piezoelectric micropump that circulates fluid through a series of tubes between the upper and lower diaphragms. The micropump occupies less than 0.2cm² of space on the device. The pump circulates the fluid, moving around tubes that act as heat sinks and radiators, absorbing heat from the SoC and slowly releasing it on its way back to the pump.
OnePlus claims that Active Cryoflux can reduce temperatures by up to 2.1°C, making it more suitable for 3-4 FPS in games. During charging, the temperature can drop by 1.6°C, reducing charging time by 30-45 seconds.
The rest of the functionality is mostly cosmetic. OnePlus uses curved clear glass for the back cover, which the company claims is unibody, despite the obvious frames along the sides. Through the back cover you can see the partially illuminated lower tube. The area around the camera is also illuminated, and the guilloche pattern is newly etched.
It’s unclear if OnePlus will actually implement this technology in its production smartphones. The company showed an interesting self-dimming camera cover class on its Concept His One at CES 2020, but never implemented it in a production device. Of course, not all concept features have to be productized.
