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."

I don't get it

Would someone enlighten me? What is the principle behind ionic cooling? The article shows how to build it, but not why it works :).

Re:I don't get it

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

How an 'ionic wind' works.

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:How an 'ionic wind' works.

I think the ionic breeze actually uses a pretty low voltage... it's not thousands of volts like it was in the PopMech article, because the breeze is a lot slower. Chances are, to save on wiring, they just have a simple 120 volts in a rectified AC pattern. That, incidentally, is also another difference with bug zappers... I'm pretty sure that bug zappers alternate which side is negative and which is positive, which means there's no breeze because it flips between pushing and pulling 60 times a second.

For anyone who cares... making an ion wind generator is dead simple. Smooth out the AC power into DC current, pump the voltage up to around 1000 volts, and embed the negative and positive grates into a plastic fan case. The ionic breeze costs a lot, but it's pure profit for the Sharper Image. An ionic wind is cheaper to make than a normal fan.

It is, I think, less efficient electrically than a normal fan. Not certain. It's been nearly 30 years since I made one. Mine did NOT smooth out the current, and did NOT hop up the voltage, so it was about what I think an ionic breeze is. To get the fastest breeze though I put the negative and positive sides pretty close together, so it would zap if bugs got between. My biggest problem was I didn't have any plastic spacers in it, to keep the sides apart... if it tipped over, or someone pushed on the mesh (I had nothing to prevent that either) it would short out. And, since I had no built in fuse... well. Two house outages later, my parents threw it away. :-)

Re:

You've succeeded, but the success was in not answering the question. The question wasn't about the IB so your reply was completely out of place.

Re:I don't get it

If you actually THOUGHT (or read my other post [slashdot.org]), 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.

Re:I don't get it

Yup, they actually work, due to two reasons. The ions are generated at the tip of a bunch of needles and accellerates away, causing an air stream, so that incoming air can be filtered. Also, the negative ions causes dust particles in the air to clump and settle onto the floor of the room, where your vacuum cleaner can get them.

The best devices use a combination of these effects and use a fan to force air through an electrostatic filter and inject negative ions into the outgoing airstream, to spread around the room and make dust clump and settle and get stuck in the electrostatic filter better.

I have two Bionair units in my home and it really helps to control my cat allergy - my solution to my wife's love of a gawddam cat...

Cat Allergy - You need the Michelin Mallet

A 10 inch square by 18 inch long block of wood mounted on a sledge hammer handle. Staple a piece of car tire tread to one end of the block. One good swat, and then leave the cat at the end of the driveway.

"Oh noes! Mr Mittens has been run over by a car!

oblig contrast

My current cooling system blows by comparison!

Alanis Morissette flashback . . .

For a second, I thought it said "Ironic cooling . . ."

Hmm, I wonder if that would involve a black fly and some super-cooled chardonnay.

Oh, wait, that wasn't ironic after all.

325 CMF?

On the final page it indicated that this ionic system can do 325 CMF. The rest of the units are in CFM, so I am assuming it's a typo. However, how can a fanless system do 325 cubic feet per minute? I've seen ionic systems before and they have never put out anything near that amount (at least from my non scientific estimations). If so, than this is much more than just a passive solution. Unless it is 325 CMF, and it's cubic minutes per feet, but then I think that I just went crosseyed trying to think of cubic minutes.

Cubic meters per fortnight

Perhaps CMF is cubic meters per fortnight. By my math, that's about 0.57 cubic feet per minute... they may have fooled lesser souls by using two-week -long measures of time, but we at Slashdot are much cleverer than that. Fanless, indeed.

Ozone anybody?

Isn't this a generator of ozone?

Doesn't this seem dangerous or is the output the same as one of those stand alone units?
What about cleaning it?

Re:Ozone anybody?

and it rots rubber and a number of other things

It oxidizes copper. I wouldn't want it anywhere near my motherboard.

Price

What baffles me about this mod is that he says it costs $9 to $15, but everything including the ion generator costs more than that. If he can't get the price right, what's to say its as effective has he claims? Especially since he gives us a CFM figure, but doesn't tell us how he measured it, or give us any concrete numbers on how cool it runs.

DAW computers

This would be GREAT in a audio production PC. Fans are noisy and so are liquid cooling solutions to a degree. If this could be affordable and effecient, then I could see this becoming the standard for the studio PC.

Will do more harm

In the project they use elements of a consumer air ionizer. These devices create negatively-charged ions. These are attracted by dust and smoke particles, causing the latter to fall to the ground or be attracted to positively-charged surfaces.

"All the affected airborne particles ultimately wind up on surfaces close to the ioniser, making the area immediately surrounding the ioniser dirty..." (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). The more dirt sticks to the ionizer, the less air it is able to move. anufacturers of Ionic Breeze and other such devices recommend cleaning the metal plates every couple of days. This is probably not a very practical solution for a PC. However, it's an interesting experiment.

What about ozone danger?

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 [cnn.com]

Iconic

I read the story as 'iconic' cooling system, and was looking forward to details of one of the all-time great cooling systems, one that history would long remember. Ah well.

Re:Ionic Breeze

I can't comment on the Ionic Breeze, but I can tell you the principal is perfectly sound. At my house we had an Electrostatic Air Filtration System installed, which is basically the same thing but attached to the duct work. The thing does make a noticeable difference with allergens and such (which is why we bought it).

What they show on the commercial (about wiping one off and it being filthy) is absolutely true. About once a month (for our system) you are supposed to pull out the two filters (each about the size of the average desktop PC) and the two screens (just simple mechanical filtration for the large stuff). You stick 'em in a utility sink with some dishwashing powder shake 'em around, and then let 'em soak.

You put in perfectly clear water, and when you lift the two filters out the stuff is a very solid grey color. It also leaves a hideous ring in the sink.

Electrostatic air filtration really does work. I have no doubt that the Ionic Breeze systems do work (to some degree). But the principal is absolutely sound.

Re:Ionic Breeze

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

Re:

If you can, I'm waiting for the ionic leafblower. Finally you can blow your yard trash into the neighbors yard at night without waking him up. Mwa Ha hah!

Re:laptop use

Baby, my lap is high voltage.

Re:laptop use

You already do. The backlight inverter in the LCD screen produces several thousand V(rms) initially to fire up the fluorescent tube, and somewhere in the high hundreds of volts while in operation.

http://www.ecnmag.com/article/CA602416.html [ecnmag.com]

Re:laptop use

Not for laptops but I use the stack (or chimney) effect [wikipedia.org] to cool my PC.

I build a small fire in the case to get it going - call it ironic cooling.