WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC A US upstart has developed a solid-state active cooling device not much bigger than an SD card that uses a variety of exotic technologies to suck heat out of small enclosed spaces. Solid state what? And isn’t solid state stuff usually a source of heat? To unpack this, meet Frore Systems, manufacturer of said solid state active …
Good thing the insides of PC's are so clean so no dust can clog it up.
Reminds me of the Pixtronix shutter display of 15 years ago. https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/06/22/202550/startup-aims-for-perfect-pixels/
My first thought reading the article was that this sounds very similar to what Airing (http://www.fundairing.com/) have been trying to do with their CPAP microblowers and may be a very good reason to be cagey about the technology.
I saw a video by LTT on this yesterday, and he said although its less noisy than a traditional fan, the noise on the laptop that had been retro fitted with one of these coolers was more high pitched, so in Linus opinion was more noticeable if less loud.
Apparently the company said that in purpose built devices they can turn cooler nozzle to reduce the noise though.
> Is it less noisy than a fan
Article mentioned "ultrasonic frequency" (fancy way to say "ultrasound"), which means it will probably have high-pitched harmonics, but most annoyingly, any dogs in the neighborhood will go crazy...
Gotta love the marketing naming though. It's a very clever and innovative fan system, but "solid state"?
The article states "Frore is confident it can defeat dust". This is the key here as the very small air channels will be very prone to clogging by dust and fluff. If their solution is to use a filter, then the system is only any good until the filter gets clogged.
The conventional ways of keeping dust and other airborne contamination out of forced air cooling systems are filters, or a sealed primary system that relies on heatpumps, air con or heat exchangers to exhaust the heat. If Frore have a way around that, then that is a really interesting technology, but I suspect they do not.
"Their system has a "blow backwards" mode, so their paper filters can be cleaned out by the cooling system itself."
The problem is that doesn't work 100% and the filter gets clogged from both sides.
When I worked in a machine shop, I built a PC for the owner with liquid cooling that had an external fan and air filter. The mist in the air from machine coolant would oil up the dust and coat the internals of a PC to a point where only complete disassembly and ultrasonic cleaning would do the job, ie: throw it away and buy another. A similar thing happened in a wood shop I managed, but that was solved by putting the PC for the CNC router in an enclosure feed with filtered air coming through a really big filter that got changed regularly.
I don't see this little thingy being useful in either scenario. I honestly don't take my main production computer outside for a good blow job frequently enough. When I do, there's a cloud of fine dust and cat hair that could trigger an air quality warning and environmental fine.
This...and they are high static pressure, so you don't need massive grills for air to be pulled in, they can pull air through tinier cracks...e.g. between seams, through gaps in port cut outs etc.
I don't think dust will be as big of an issue with these as with a typical fan.
Theoretically, these things could probably do a lot to indirectly cool other components in your machine as well as the thing it's attached to.
I haven't seen any videos of these things yet, but I have seen similar mechanisms in play in industrial settings and they can have a pretty significant wider cooling effect because of the sheer amount of air they pull in and thus over the components between it and where the air gets in.
James Dyson enters the room with a fan that never loses suction and a lifetime filter that never needs replacement. *
* Suction and filter excluded from warranty. View the support guide for periodic maintenance to restore suction and replace lifetime filter.
Yes, dust in a dry atmosphere, what can go wrong? Where I live, I used to fix items that engineers stated didn't have to worry about dust. Even shocked one of these smart guys when I pulled about 200ml of dust out of his "don't worry" pieces of equipment in his presence. The fans were supposed to just blow the dust through the system. We even sealed equipment that were never designed to be sealed since dust was getting into them. It was a local mod that saved many man hours of work.
Any moving air with the fine dust just causes static and then the dust becomes like glue and forced air won't remove it. I will pass.
tech inside is NASA-grade purified vacuumised cavity lattice, 4-D-interspaced with hypressured fissure of low-density / high-stability oxygenised sub-atomic, and aerogenically-enhanced compound thingies, in a few words ;)
So this solid state cooling system is, in fact, an air-cooled system with a solid but essentially mechanical heat pump. I was expecting some sort of Peltier effect device such as those I used in the '70s & '80s. Even though they were solid state devices they were only heat pumps and they still needed water cooling to back them up.
I suppose every cooling system is a heat pump of some kind, moving heat from the place you don't want it to somewhere else.
The questions are efficiency and whether they can actually work against a gradient - moving heat from a cool place to a hot place - or only from a hot place to a cool place.
A Peltier can work against a gradient and has no moving parts.
This one is just a fancy fan.
It's only interesting if it's quieter or longer-lived than a traditional fan of around the same size.
ISTR reviews of using Peltier coolers sandwiched between the CPU and a large heat-sink back in the days of 486 CPUs when people wanted silent cooling but CPUs were reaching the stage of requiring fans. There was enough extra benefit that DX2/66 or DX4/100 could still operate fanless with an added Peltier. I often wondered why they seemed to disappear from the market but the explanation of the poor efficiency explains it. There was a small window of opportunity for small amount of additional cooling before they became too inefficient to be viable inside a PC.
"ISTR reviews of using Peltier coolers sandwiched between the CPU and a large heat-sink back in the days of 486 CPUs when people wanted silent cooling but CPUs were reaching the stage of requiring fans."
Back in the days of the first Macs there was a chimney you could fit on the top that would increase airflow velocity through the case. Heat became an issue with clamp-on upgrades and people not wanting to bodge a fan onto the back of the case. I never got one and haven't seen any for ages. I have a stack of those older Macs and would love to find one.
The Zotac industrial computers shipping with these things (on display at computex now) are of that order of magnitude of power output.
They do have a hacked samsung laptop on display, similarly modified and performing better than a stock cooler though, so there's something in the idea. Gamersnexus did some decent coverage of it, recommended.
Desktop PCs?
I would of thought 1U servers would be the £ primary target for something smaller than a traditional Xeon cpu cooler.
My quick we search indicates the cooler needs to move 92 watts from a xeon at circa 3 GHz. So that would indicate a Xeon will need an array of circa 18 of these.
Sorry, a little confused here...isn't the meaning of "solid state" that something has no moving parts?
And isn't vibration a form of movement?
I am not a material scientist, so maybe there is something I don't get about this. If anyone wants to enlighten me, I'm all ears.
"isn't the meaning of "solid state" that something has no moving parts?"
'Solid state' originated as a descriptor for semiconductor electronic devices (transistors) as opposed to vacuum tubes (valves) -- (electrons travelling in a solid rather than through vacuum) -- so moving parts or not was not the issue. Nowadays as any word can mean almost anything you want, maybe 'no moving parts' applies. However, by both definitions a peltier heat pump would pass muster.
It dissipates an additional 4.25 Watts at 85C in a slim laptop that had no cooling or fan, according to literature.
4.25W at a 65C difference is passive cooling territory. That's comparable to a copper foil spreader, a thermally conductive pad to the case, or a small air hole.
I don't think even an Asus ROG phone could use this fan. Cellphone makers would be very interested in active liquid heat spreaders that can be built into the phone back cheaply. One company claims they have a prototype.
Someone upthread mentioned a recently expired Intel patent for something that seemed very similar. So, maybe it's no longer patentable, or maybe the fact Intels patent expired and we never saw a product, Intel maybe never solved the issues of making a functional device and so held back development for 20 years by sitting on it all that time. And maybe this new one does something special or unique and they've decided to go the "trade secret" route, at least initially but is probably built on what Intel patented and may not be patentable if not different enough. It may not be different at all, just this one seems to work, possibly thanks to better materials science or micro-scale engineering techniques, ie nothing new in terms patentability. Although this is the US, where almost anything appears to be patentable :-)
>” is probably built on what Intel patented and may not be patentable if not different enough.”
Unless it is identical to the Intel patents, it will be patentable, if only because they have made it work with modern materials.
Remember the Marconi radio patent didn’t contain anything “new” other than the way Marconi had put the parts together and tuned them.
Suspect they are keeping quiet about the patents as there is probably an application “in the system”.
" it will be patentable, if only because they have made it work with modern materials."
Doubtful. I've been warned by a patent attorney that it's a real bugger to try and get a patent based mainly on new materials and not coming up with a new approach. Patents can be very expensive to get, but they are even more expensive to defend so the only point in getting one that's on the edge is if you do all of the work yourself getting one awarded to be able to put it on your brag sheet (resume). I have a couple of patents I'm proud of, but I have no means of enforcing them and they'll expire later this year and next anyway.
According to the footer of the brochure (see link in article), patents are pending. Suspect the application(s) is not in the company name, hindering cursory seaches.
A quick Google “ us patent application pulsating jets cooling” does not list any recent applications, however it does return a number of abandoned and active patents that seem to be relevant.
They used to have all manor of weird and ridiculously expensive to make and buy kit from the MoD and various of its suppliers off the auctions.
One of those odds n sods in the various knick-knacks bargain bin was a piezo electric fan i picked up sometime around 1987-90 for about £5, whilst i was in the area on a call out.
very bulky and with a 10cm long flexi paddle, something around 5 to 12v dc and it would move a noticeable breeze, enough for low powered kit that required no noise.
Linus Sebastian had something similar on LTT a while back and quoted a current RRP of about $10k...
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