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Ionic Cooling For Your Computer
master0ne writes, "We (the folks over at InventGeek) have produced the first ionic cooling system for your high-end gaming system. This system produces absolutely no noise and in fact has no moving parts at all. While this is a proof of concept, it demonstrates that you can get the CFM you need to cool a system efficiently with no moving parts and no increase in power consumption."
Ionic cooling "uses an electrical charge to create a cooling air jet right at the surface of the chip." (from digg)
Basically, it charges the ions at or very close to the surface of the chip to act as a "magnet" for air.
-gjr
Basically the ions move the air instead of a rotating fan.i ps04.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/283716_coolch
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Read more here: Danger: Ionizing air purifiers impure
A lot of law suits flew around as a result of the Ionic Breeze, here is some information about it.
Anyway, it does pull dust out of the air. The amount it actually pulls looks impressive, but is actually so insignificantly small as to almost be immeasurable (as Consumer Reports found). You need like 20 of them in your room to make a noticable difference.
Further, they produce ozone, which then fills the room. Ozone can be harmful to people with some breathing disorders, so in some cases it actually makes things worse.
I don't know if the system mentioned by the poster also produces ozone, or if it also removes an insignificantly small amount of pollution, but the Ionic Breeze is simply not worth the money.
Further, the things are *NOT* silent. They make static-electricity noises. They don't start making them instantly..you have to run them for a few weeks. Then they start making zappy/poppy noises. They aren't hurt-your-ears loud or anything, but you do hear them, and they do just go on and on (even after you clean the plates).
Lastly, the darn things outright break after a few months.
The HEPA air filters are bulky and loud, but they actually get the job done. If you need clean air, go with that instead.
You already do. The backlight inverter in the LCD screen produces several thousand V(rms) initially to fire up the fluorescent tube, and somewhere in the high hundreds of volts while in operation.
http://www.ecnmag.com/article/CA602416.html
I had an Ionic breeze, and it definitely works. It moves a fair bit of air, and it definitely takes dust out. Those plates get dirty pretty quickly, and you do just have to wipe it off.
However, I found that it while it's silent to start with, it doesn't stay "silent. As it gets dirty, it start to buzz a little bit. Wiping the plates doesn't entirely fix it, because stuff also sticks to the other pole of the circuit. There are 4 long wires suspended in the case from top to that ionize the dust, and then the plates attract it. Eventually, the wires get dirty too, and to clean them you need to wipe them somehow. I used a bit of paper towel taped to the end of a piece of arrowshaft tubing. It's a pain to do, and while I never did it, it would be easy to break the wire.
My ionic breeze blew the internal fuse one day, when one of the capacitors in the high-voltage power supply spewed it's guts out, and I never bothered to fix it.
There's probably a lot better ways to cool off computer chips, I would think. A heat sink with a thermionic cooler would seem a lot more practical.
Brett
A strong negative electric charge is put into one side of the system. This side should have many sharp points angled toward the positive side to be the most efficient. Negative charge builds up in this grid, concentrated at those points. The charge is not enough to actually arc across the air and make a spark, but it is high... high enough that electrons leap across, one by one. Actually, they're leaping across in the millions and billions per second, but they're so tiny that the effect is imperceptible.
:-)
This 'leaping' across has always seemed like how ice sublimates into a gas... it doesn't melt into water, then evaporate, an ice cube in dry air can evaporate directly. In the case of the electrons, they don't melt and flow across (spark) they just imperceptibly leap off one by one. Yeah, it's a bad analogy, but it's the best I can think of.
As the electrons leap across the gap, they sometimes run into air molecules. When they strike, they can merge with that molecule, and turn it into an ion... this air ion now has a negative charge, and it gets drawn toward the posotive side too... pulled across, the air molecule bumps and shoves other air molecules, and you get a current of air, many of them negatively charged ions.
This 'other side' happens to be big flat metal plates in the 'ionic breeze', but it doesn't have to be. It could be a simple grid of metal, like chicken wire or something. Anything that can carry a current, and let air blow past it.
The charge between the two can be thousands of volts, but the current is very small. However, something getting in that gap, like a bug, could get zapped. Yeah, bug zappers are technically 'ionic breeze' machines too, but the voltage and their shape is not optimized to blow air.
As to where I learned this... all hail Popular Mechanics. An article way back in the late 70's demonstrated these, but not to make ions... they demonstrated a grid powerful enough to take off. Imagine a perfectly silent helicopter with no moving parts, trailing a thick heavy power cable (because they couldn't generate enough electricity onboard to lift it on its own). Definitely a nifty idea.
The Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I do believe you are correct. Ozone isn't terribly good for people and it rots rubber and a number of other things. Goto the chemistry department at your local university -- you won't find a copier machine anywhere near the labs. The ozone generated by them rots the stoppers and seals and what not.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
If you actually THOUGHT (or read my other post), you'd realize that the claim of 325 CFM is utterly ridiculous, even without considering that he made no mention of his testing methods. 325 CFM would be a wind tunnel, and he most definately would have heard something (a vague howling sound perhaps?) if that number was accurate.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
and it rots rubber and a number of other things
It oxidizes copper. I wouldn't want it anywhere near my motherboard.
"The main reason we chose the Intel CPU is if for some reason there was a thermal issue it will self-protect the CPU unlike AMD's" Has he been living in a cave?, it hasn't been that way since the release of the Kt333 and Nforce chipsets for socketA, and never has had any issue on socket 754 and over Also he does mention the core 2 duo, but I am still surprised that he didn't build it around one in the first place, or at least something which puts out less heat than a pentium D at 3.2ghz..... and certainly he didn't think about building it around a mobile cpu like the older pentium M's or core duo's, turion or mobile sempron, or even a low energy X2.... and another little gripe--- the CFM's he is reporting seem wayyyy out of proportion, I don't think he knows how to differentiate a CFM from his ass.... I mean, look, the very expensive ones I see barely have enough flow to make a 5" long ribbon attached to it float...
His ionic system would be roughly the length of the entire case if he bought an Ionic Breeze knockoff. With that size, it's possible he has that much airflow, versus, say, a standard 120mm fan which can do maybe 50CFM but covers a small fraction of the entire case.
Moving a large volume of air (CFM) over a large surface area is not going to cause a howling wind.
By that I presume you mean charge by time, which is current.
By introducing a large amount of charge to your body, you get a large difference in potential, which will have to discharge somewhere. However, more charge discharging in a short amount of time can be very damaging to meatbags like us, if for no other reason than the thermal excitation it causes along its path. Very high voltages can cause other problems, but as long as there's a low current, it's not really a problem.
I think a proper analogy would be to use heat as an example. Holding a warm cake in your lap for a couple hours while it cools off isn't going to cause you serious harm, although it may make you hungry. A small drop of molten lead with the same amount of heat would cause very severe damage when dropped in your lap, because the energy is transferred in a very short amount of time.
Fnord.
The device is actually nowhere near the processor. He took the innards of an Ionic Breeze, built a shielded box around them, and put them up front where you normally have your drive cages. The only mod to the processor heatsink was a grounding strap.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".