Slashdot Mirror


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.

1 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. I already have a better version working. by John+Sokol · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso