Ionic Winds Chilling Your Computer

Iddo Genuth writes to mention The Future of Things online magazine is reporting that Kronos Advanced Technologies in cooperation with Intel and the University of Washington claims to have developed a new type of ultra-thin, silent cooling technology for processors. The piece covers many of the cooling technologies currently available, how their new corona discharge cooler works, and a short interview with several of the key team members.

Comments

What about all that dust?

[TheSexican]

Won't it get quite dusty in there?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[ewhac]

This story doesn't pass the smell test.

First, for corona discharge to occur at all requires thousands of volts of energy. Basically enough to leap off the conductor -- and into the semiconductor. This is easily several times the amount of voltage needed to fry any VLSI chip.

Second, the amount of airflow generated by corona discharge is infinitesimal, especially given the amount of energy required to get it to happen at all. Some simple thermal models will tell you how much air you have to displace in order to remove a given amount of heat, and you'll see that you're never going to get that kind of volume moved via corona discharge.

Maybe there have been some new discoveries since I last played with static electricity. But personally I think someone's shoveling bovine offal.

Schwab

I already have a better version working.

[John Sokol]

I spent 3 years from 2002 to 2005 working on a silent computing company, Nisvara. We had offices at NASA Ames, Moffet Field in Mountain View California. It seems like everyone loved what we had, Intel, Sun, ATI, HP, Siemens to name a few. None the less it ended up falling apart.

It's now dead, as one of the people we invited in to help manage thought he would just declare himself the owner just a week before we were to get a $500K grant from the California Energy Commission. When he failed he just trashed the company realizing founders (including myself) were left with nothing. He even managed to get GoDaddy to take the domain out of my name with forged corperate papers, it's been wedged since...

It really breaks my heart. We developed so many very cool prototypes and inventions for cooling computers.

One was using the Ionic Breeze technique to provide just a slight air flow, but it increases the efficiency of the heat sink but a large amount. Problem that they fail to mention is the heatsink really attracts dust, just like the ionic breaze, so you need to get in there with a brush quite often.

Below is a link to many of the prototypes I built. I don't have a photo of the ionic version, but it was just the desktop unit with the large aluminum heatsinks with a plastic duct/ shield was added and a set of fine wires was run across the bottom of the large aluminum heat sinks with -6000V DC on it.
The aluminum heat sinks were grounded.

  Worked great, but you wouldn't' want to stick your finger in there.

Also in the picture are water cooled prototypes, Carbon Fiber "bridges" that had a much higher thermal conductivity then copper and other misc stuff.

  I am planning to add many more photo's, papers, data and schematics and open source the designs at this point...

http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html

Hey, I worked with these guys!

[LynnwoodRooster]

Igor, Joshua, Rich, and the whole crew at Kronos, over in Redmond. Good bunch of guys...

They've got some innovative takes on the ionic drive, including keeping ozone production WAY down. Also, with proper panel design, you can get some wicked airflow - we were playing with a 12" x 12" x 7" thick multi-stage panel that would move 700 CFM. Yes, that really blows!

One thing to remember is that the voltage required scales with distance. It's on the order of 5 kV/cm, so if you're down to a mm you "only need" 500V to make it work.

And no, you don't want a discharge! Sparking is BAD. Corona effect is to be avoided - you want to operate just below that point, were you get good ion flow from emitter to collector, but no corona to generate ozone, or sparks.

On the whole, if you ABSOLUTELY NEED zero moving parts, this is a good way to go. You can get high airflow AND dust filtration in a relatively compact form factor. But it's not cheap, and getting it UL certified isn't exactly the easiest (although it has been done for some products; I worked with them on a few new products and led their team in a couple of research projects).