Curious what folks here, especially the mechanical and electrical engineer minded folks, think about…
Very compact silent solid state active thermal cooling, using oscillating Mems on chip and jet impingement heat transfer. Current 1st gen chips move 5W of heat using 1W power. High back pressure is able to overcome resistance from dust filters. Cost unknown, expect to start appearing in devices later this year. Good fit for compact energy consuming devices that need to dissipate heat, e.g. laptops.
Very interesting. I wonder why there aren’t more mems applications. This seems like one of those. “why didn’t I think of that?” Things. But also. Very innovative.
This does seem insanely awesome. As he said, If it starts scaling like processors do in performance…WOW.
Jet impingement, I need to look at that. I had several classes that included boundary layer calculations. I am also wishing I would have taken the MEMS program my school offered. This is just nuts. Thank you so much for sharing this link.
I studied thermal transfer and boundary layers a bit… sounds like a solid way to get more efficiency per mass flow. These things should be much quieter than fans for the same performance, and the filtering benefits would be huge. I’m curious what the cost and lifespan of these devices will look like. The spinning pinwheel demo was pretty impressive… that thing does kick out a lot of air for it’s size! The low reynolds CFD they did on it would be interesting to see.
Jeff, a 1W fan on a giant copper heatsink can dissipate a lot more than 5W, but it won’t fit in a laptop. They definitely would have to scale these things up a lot to handle like a 4090 laptop. Who knows how long before that happens. There seems like a lot of other smaller applications that would catch on quickly, and hopefully that feeds into r&d that leads to quiet game laptops sooner.
I am not that interested in a 4090. But I sure would appreciate it on my steam deck! I bet that would be closer to 30-50W though. And I don’t really want to sacrifice 20% battery to do it.
Still, there are a lot of reasons why this is easier to improve than a fan. So hopefully it will be self sustaining and grow exponentially.
Or else, someone will buy them, hold the patents, shut it down, and we won’t see progress for 25 years .
I saw a lot of people talking about this on SM somewhere and there were a lot of comments that mems and silicone manufacturing in general was under utilized. We could really see a lot of new stuff coming out like this.
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