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."

Re:It cost 14$? wtf?

[AP2k]

Yes and no. The purifier they used obviously was not included in the cost. But to make an ionic purifier for yourself would cost next to nothing just the same.

Its just a high voltage transformer, its driver circuit, and some plates.

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

My brother uses an ionic cooling system. His system was overheating, so he took off one of the sides, added some mosquito blocking metal mesh for porches and pointed his ionic breeze at the case. Works well enough.

Price

[Doomstalk]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[flyingfsck]

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...

Re:How an 'ionic wind' works.

[lostguru]

why do i not like the idea of something designed to fall just short of a static generator built in to my computer?



Me, I'll stick to fans. My fans are quiet enough and my computer doesn't run that hot anyway

--WAM

Re:How an 'ionic wind' works.

[The Raven]

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:325 CMF?

[Havenwar]

Actually fanless is as not having a fan attached... it still needs adequate airflow, as in for instance produced by... a fan. Usually a casefan.

But I do agree the article in general is subpar when it comes to needed data. In order for me to take them seriously I'd have to see how they measured the airflow, a temp over time test readout, and since they included a project cost - a good breakdown of it. Also I'd like to see them adress the cleaning issue which would obviously be a bit ardous with such a system.

Cool proof of concept though. What it mostly points to is the fact that the usual way to do things doesnt have to be the only one. There are plenty of room for innovation in how one builds a system.