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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!
Cool!
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
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.
You are quite right. The AC has no idea what he is talking about. If only his grasp of "simple heat transfer" matched his arrogance. This is not a sealed chamber. The ions impart momentum to a near wall flow and destroy the boundary layer. Good mixing at the wall = good heat transfer! (The article says as much) These Purdue dudes have a lot of neat electronics cooling stuff going on. I had the pleasure of getting the whole delivery at a seminar last Fall.
That's completely idiotic.
The fact that a certain car has a more powerful A/C is because it was designed to be more powerful, NOT because of the refrigerant. No doubt your old Toyota's A/C demands far more power to operate than any of the newer ones you've compared it with.
There is a difference between refrigerants, but it's a very small one, and couldn't REMOTELY account for your magical little story there. In fact, air conditioners have been getting more and more energy efficient over the years, at the same time that refrigerants have been getting less toxic.
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