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New Chip-cooling Technology
BillOfThePecosKind writes "Researchers have demonstrated a new technology using tiny "ionic wind engines" that might dramatically improve computer chip cooling, possibly addressing a looming threat to future advances in computers and electronics. Purdue researchers funded by Intel have improved the "heat-transfer coefficient" by some 250%. I never liked water cooled systems, and this sounds promising. However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."
"I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."
Produces? Hey, let's make a ton of these and solve the ozone hole problem forever!
"However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."
Great! We solved the global warming. Let's get cranking.
Cool!
FWIS The "ionic wind" takes place inside a sealed chamber, no ozone would be leaking out.
On the one hand, ground level ozone is a problem. It is one of the prime constituants of smog. The ozone that protects us is much higher in the atmosphere.
On the other hand, ozone is extremely reactive. Ozone generated in your computer probably won't make it out of your house. Besides that, some people deliberately generate ions to purify the air. I really wouldn't worry about the ozone.
Red to blue = good!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09
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." And another post
From Jan 3, 2007
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01
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. And my reply on that one.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2148
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. Here is another reply from Jonathan Walther Give John Sokol the credit (Score:3, Informative)
by Jonathan Walther (676089) Alter Relationship on Wednesday January 03, @09:00PM (#17452802)
Back in 2002 when John Sokol was designing the first, and still the most efficient silent computer, we discussed the ionic air cooling. I think it was Bill Drury who first mentioned it. We put it off as a possible future direction to go. It didn't seem like it would be nearly as productive a direction as the thermal ground technology John developed. Time has proven John right; his thermal plane and thermal ground patents will revolutionize the computer industry fairly soon now. As a director of Nisvara, I can't reveal more than that at this time. But if you want a silent computer with no moving parts and even lower power consumption than these "coronal discharge" guys are claiming, get in touch with John Sokol.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Not unless you cool your CPU with an Ionic Breeze!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Hmm then what is this 'Ionic breeze' thing sitting beside me that is blowing air around my room with no fans or other moving parts? Or the industrial electrostatic cleaners that have been around for decades longer?
New application of really old technology would be a bit more accurate.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Chips are eventually going to require cryo-like gear to keep it from roasting. We're not going to have that kind of equipment in our homes so it'll be back to time-sharing to run whatever CPU chewing bloatware we're running by then.
Does this mean now that our computers may have yet another thing that can go wrong? They might break wind.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Which pretty much applies to any other technology.
The problem is the power consumption on this thing. If you assume that they want to move all the air in a small region around the wire even once per second, say 10mm x 1mm x 1cm, to use the dimension quoted in TFA and nominal orders of magnitude for chip size and wire thickness, that corresponds to something ~ 10^-5 moles of air. Since Nitrogen has an ionization energy of 1402.3 kJ/mol (Wikipedia), that means if you want to move that quantity of air every second, you need at least something around 15W. That's even assuming you perfectly convert electrical energy into removing electrons from air molecules, and it's just to ionize the air, neglecting the extra energy it then takes to get the ions moving (we'll pretend the fan does all that, even though that would mean that our device isn't doing jack).
I don't know how much energy my laptop uses, but my power adapter is 65W, so 15 seems non-negligible.
Twin Ion Wind Engine!f ighter.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/TIE
The ozone is needed at high altitude to provide a shield. At low altitudes ozone is bad stuff to have around and is highly damaging.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
or are they just blowing hot air?
HCFCs still burn a hole into the ozone layer, and the full damage from released CFCs and HCFCs can take up to 50 years as it is a chain reaction. I worked on air conditioners in the military and had to become EPA certified on the stuff. I got the "Universal" license from the EPA. The biggest offender in this area is still the US government. While most civilian vehicles have newer HCFC-based air conditioners, the military does not. And not everyone has banned CFCs fully yet.
From the Wikipedia:
"By the year 2010 CFCs should be completely eliminated from developing countries as well."
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Actually, I'd read that ion-wind technology could be used as a propulsion mechanism for large high-altitude airships. Hey, then you could produce ozone while meeting people's transportation needs at the same time.
Maybe a suped-up version of one of those Aeroscraft thingies could feature this.
This technology looks like it might deposit a large electric charge on the surface of the chip. This will have to be dissipated, before it dissipates itself by creating an electrostatic discharge on (or capacitively coupled to) one of the chips interconnects.
To avoid this the insulating passivation layer will probably have to be topped by an additional conductive layer. This layer, in turn, will increase the capacitive load on the interconnects and likely require additional chip power to switch them.
I expect it will still be a big net improvement. But deploying it won't be trivial.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Link this technology with an optical chipset and see how much faster it goes! Insane idea. It could work.
The game.
We have had an electrostatic air filter for about thirty years. It does an amazing job of cleaning the air. It definately keeps the old allergies at bay. I get a good night's sleep when I'm at home. If I'm on the road, I tend to puff up. We have a carbon filter right after the es filter. You can easily tell the places where the air bypasses the ES elements because you can see quite a dust buildup on the carbon elements at those points.
Were you aware that the best way to de-stink a place is to use air ionizers. They're the favorite of disaster clean-up specialists and marijuana grow-ops everywhere.
Ionized air may or may not be healthy but air ionizers certainly can remove junk from the air and really do improve the smell of a place.
Ozone is triatomic oxygen... O3. Its created when sufficient energy is applied to O2 to split the atom into monoatomic oxygen, and the resulting O1's each combine with an O2. The characteristic smell is caused by ions resulting from the process, not the ozone itself. Ionic generators used for air purification merely add electrons to air molecules and to particles in the air. Negatively charged molecules are then attracted to positive electrodes. The energy required to ionize the air is not sufficient to split O2 molecules. If you think you smell ozone, its just ions. SOME ionic air cleaners also sanitize the air, by flowing it past a UV light. This process Does produce ozone. From engineers whose business is designing sewage treatment plants, I learned that ozone for sanitizing the water is made using intense UV light. Its the same process as occurs in the upper atmosphere.
Science fiction movies have been showing us for years that future computers spew fountains of sparks at the slightest disturbance. And soon they will.
Now this is all interesting and so, but what about making those chips be a bit more power efficient for starters? I mean save some remaining high-end applications, modern processing power is enough. More than enough for 99% of the applications.
It'd be nice if the CPUs would become more power efficient, that has so many advantages: lower power bills, saving the environment, longer battery life for laptops, silent computers for less need of cooling, etc. For now it seems every new incarnation of the major CPUs (Intel, AMD) is wasting only more power!
but the car manufacturers are not so keen because it requires some very scary pressures. They tend not to like customers to blow up when they crash (because then the customers can't come back and buy another car)
that would be like getting a woolen jumper big enough and a comb long enough to power your computer with static electricity.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
This is on the BBC as well, so it actually may not be total "carbon nanotubes water to oil device" nonsense.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Many people are subject to large O3 doses on a regular base. In their office, sitting next to an ancient laser printer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The ionic wind turbine.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Try running a Core 2 Quad and 8800 Ultra together - your PC will become a space heater. Nice in the winter perhaps but not good for hot summers without air conditioning. All this will do is keep the CPU a bit cooler, but the same amount of heat will be generated.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Think of all the -O3 they're exposed to daily. Simply terrible.
Why not make the processors energy efficient in the first place? I don't see why my laptop is heated up to 55C right now, when all that power could go into stopping iTunes from clipping tracks...
It is: "The device contained a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. The anode was positioned about 10 millimeters above the cathodes. When voltage was passed through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharged electrons toward the positively charged anode. Along the way, the electrons collided with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which were then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes, creating an "ionic wind."
... profit!
Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft
Even Mythbusters managed to get one to work, so Purdue should have no problem. Not until someone applies "prior art" from T.T. Brown's patents and shoots down their (incl. Intel's) aspirations of
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Ionic wind engines not only keep the chips cool, but they promise to leave them smelling fresh and clean. I learned all about this technology on a late-night infomercial :)
Eek!
Numa numa.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
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.
Who brushes dust into the room? Surely we vacuum it up. Anyway, this is a huge problem affecting virtually all desktop computers. They start off with an optimal design, the customer runs it for a week or two and at that point they have the equivalent of a two-year old computer that SlowSteps so it won't fry itself. I would love to know the percentage of people who never vacuum the inside of their systems...
This new type of air cooling may be at least a partial solution to the dust accumulation problem and I am as excited by that as the improved cooling possibilities. In the meantime, we need a way to vacuum the dust without opening the case. Then people would actually do it, and I would do it more often.
My contribution: a small circular hole in the case and a "straw" (flared to the size of a vacuum on the exterior end). The housing of the straw would allow a range of movement that covered the top area of the processor. To use: hook up your vacuum to the straw, move the straw around, done.
I come here for the love
Um, wouldnt this create a LOT of RF interference?
O-Zone is the group that sang Dragostea Din Tei.
I've always wondered, could you use this technology for propulsion? Create an ion wind and push it behind you? Is it possible? Why hasn't it been done?
... I wonder about potential ESD problems (pun intended).
Have gnu, will travel.