Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven's got some exciting news about the possibility of replacing laptop fans with silent ionic cooling systems. My laptop runs as loud and hot as a jet-engine, as does my wife's — add to that the noise from the consoles and the PVR and our living room sounds like the inside of a wave-machine.
Tessera's ionic cooler sits near a vent inside the laptop. Heat pipes, which transfer heat using the evaporation and condensation of a fluid, draw heat away from the computer's processing units and toward the ionic-cooling system. Inside the ionic-cooling device are two electrodes: one that ionizes air molecules such as nitrogen, and another that acts as a receiver for those molecules. When a voltage is applied between the two electrodes, the ions flow from the emitter electrode to the collector. As they move, their momentum pushes neutral air molecules across a hot spot, cooling it down…
The system can extract roughly 30 percent more heat from a laptop than a conventional fan can, and lab tests show that it could potentially consume only half as much power, the company says…
