Cool Your PC or Laptop with Ionic Wind
Tessera is developing a cooling system that charges ions to move air particles away from a laptop's heat source.
Back in March, international chip-packaging company Tessera presented a unique idea to attendees of the IEEE Semi-Therm Symposium. The presentation illustrated a way to cool a working laptop by eliminating the commonly used fan. In its place, Tessera proposed a cooling system that charges ions to move air particles away from the heat source. According to the company, this unique iconic-cooling system can actually extract 30-percent more heat from a device than the conventional exhaust fan.
"Today, consumers are demanding electronic products--such as notebook computers, game consoles, and set-top boxes--that are high performance, ultra compact and extremely reliable," the company said. "However as these products become increasingly more computing-centric, they are generating substantially more heat in smaller areas and putting a strain on conventional cooling solutions: mechanical fan-based systems that are large, noisy, and unreliable."
As defined in the company's presentation, a high intensity electric field ionizes air molecules surrounding the cooling system's electrode tip. While the ions travel from the corona electrode to a collector electrode, they collide with neutral air particles, transferring charge and momentum, and increasing airflow. As an example, Tessera's ionic cooling system could be mounted next to a laptop vent. Heat pipes leading from the stressed CPU would carry the heat to a point between the ionic cooling system electrodes. Thus, the charged molecules, moving from the corona to the collector, would carry the heat away from the heatpipe, and out the vent.
The development process hasn't been easy for the company, however. Because laptops are built to function for at least 30,000 hours, the research team needed to find a way to keep the electrode materials from corroding prematurely. Another challenge presented itself in the form of power consumption, requiring the development of a converter that transforms the laptop battery's 12 volts DC into the required 3,000 volts necessary to power the ionic cooler. The research team eventually developed a tiny power supply roughly three centimeters square in size.
Tessera is currently trying to determine how to reduce the amount of dust invading the space surrounding the electrodes, possibly by using a prefilter to lessen the amount of damaging particles. "Dust collection reduces efficiency," the company said, adding that multiple solutions are still under development. According to Tessera, stock laptops will not need to be altered other than removing the pre-installed fans. The cooling system is fully self-contained, featuring the ionic blower and power supply built right into the fan cavity.
Ultimately, the advantage to having this system installed is that it remains quiet, features no moving parts, costs less than the conventional fan, has a flexible form factor, and consumes less power. Unfortunately, the technology is still under development. However, Craig Mitchell, senior vice president of the Interconnect, Components, and Materials division of Tessera, said that the company plans to commercialize the system next year.
Check your spelling.
liquid cooling is great and all, but if you're building a cheap HTPC, it may be out of budget.
This is saying cheap, quiet, efficient. I like the idea of it. Makes sense if you want something quiet that performs well.
Performs well, Unless you get dust.. Im in Iraq right now... This would never work here and I know common folk refuse to dust their PC's... it will spell disaster!!
How about 1 amp? /gg
You have never heard, "Volts Hurt, Amps Kill"???
I wouldn't want to have to google myself out of a locked closet with one of these in my laptops...
6000 V * 1 amp = 6000 joule is quite enough to char you. I wonder if there's that much energy in the laptop battery, though.
as for making heatsink bigger,,this is for a laptop, ppl are trying to make them smaller, not heavier
I agree the ozone part may be an issue,,but who knows how much is actually generated, it may take days in a completely sealed room to have enough to cause a problem.
Hm... costs less to produce, it will not be cheap for us.
Surely there are safety issues with 3000V being on a device like a laptop; risk of getting electrocuted, risk of distorting radiofrequencies like wireless lan, cellphone signals, the internal sound card, interferring with hearing devices (or perhaps pacemakers)...
It's pretty hard to imagine, looking at my laptop, that this device will be able to extend more heat than a fan, seeing that my laptop's fan is pretty powerful and needs a lot of air to cool it.
So perhaps the system used needs a larger surface? It's hard to imagine it could extract more heat from a laptop than a fan would, while not being able to provide the same airflow.
What would happen if an obstacle would be next to the laptop (eg: an empty plastic bottle placed next to the fan's exhaust)? With less airflow, and still more heat being extracted, the bottle could locally heat up a lot, and perhaps even melt.
Hard to believe... Especially if they say that it 'costs less than a fan'. Since a laptop fan costs less than $1, it is hard to believe those claims are true!