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."

Comments

Re:I don't get it

[macz]

Basically the ions move the air instead of a rotating fan.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/283716_coolchi ps04.html

What about ozone danger?

[mTor]

These cooling systems use the same principle as ionic air purifiers. Consumer Reports did several studies and they have issued several warnings about dangerous ozone levels that these machines might create. This is the reason why I ditched my Ionic Breeze air "purifier".

The magazine also said that people with asthma or respiratory allergies are especially sensitive to indoor ozone, an irritant that can worsen asthma, deaden sense of smell, raise sensitivity to pollen and mold, and may cause permanent lung damage.

Read more here: Danger: Ionizing air purifiers impure

Re:Ionic Breeze

[Brett Buck]

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

How an 'ionic wind' works.

[The Raven]

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

Re:I don't get it

[StikyPad]

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.