So when is a chicken not a chicken? When it ducks!
You might be wondering how in the world that pathetic old joke is relevant to those spinning little (or big) fans in your computer case. If you’re a custom PC builder, be it for the sweet sound of silence, or for some rage against the machine overclocking, if there’s one thing that you know, it’s fans. Electronics don’t like to be hot, and whether it’s moving air over a heatsink or moving air over a liquid cooling radiator, at some point you just have to transfer the heat that computer parts generate into the air. That means you need Ye Olde Whirling Dervish, AKA a fan.
But fans are tricky. You’re often limited to the size of the fan that you can use, which reduces their efficiency. The speed that they run at and the design of the fan blades determine all sorts of factors from the amount of air moved, to the pressure of the air, to the focus cone of how the air moves, to the amount of power the fans consume, to the noise that they make as the blades spin around going whir whir whir. And then there’s the bearing design. How long will the fan really last? When it comes to PCs, fans are a tricky business!
But what if your fan … wasn’t a fan?
General Electric has developed an interesting novel approach to moving air in consumer electronics, which they based not on Ye Olde Whirling Dervish, but on a bellows. Taking a concept from their commercial jet engines, GE used tiny ceramic piezoelectronics and two 40mm x 40mm metal plates to make what they call a Dual Piezo Cooling Jet (DCJ).
The little buggers are smaller than fans, move more air, use less electricity, and make so little noise as to be virtually inaudible. And with no bearings to grind, in theory they’ll last longer too! Allegedly they don’t even gather dust. In theory they’re better all-around than any fan.
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Sounds great! Where can I get a DCJ?” that’s where problems start to come in. Because GE isn’t really interested in manufacturing and selling the DCJs themselves. They’re only promoting the intellectual property. GE is presently demonstrating DCJs to manufacturers and so far have licensed the design to only one company: Fujikura LTD of Japan. So it may be some time yet before you can buy one.
There’s also another problem: the way that they work. As you watch their video, you realize one really important thing, DCJs are thin. Like really really thin. Sure, they create a jet of air, but how often in a big PC case do you need a really tiny Jetstream? If you want a big fan, or need to cover a lot of area, the DCJ may not be for you. They look to create a very concentrated little jetstream. Sure, it moves air, but how many of the little buggers do you need to cover as much area as you want? And in the case of an exhaust fan, what’ll it feel like to be the person who dares to walk behind the computer? So there may be a few features that need tweaking for PC use. It’s a design that’ll work great in super-thin devices, like smartphones, tablets, and ultrabooks. I’m not so convinced about larger consumer electronics though. Not without a serious rethink of how air moves in the device. I don’t see someone fitting a DCJ into any traditional fan slot. They just work too differently, moving air along a completely different axis.
I’m also not sure that I like the idea of my cellphone having a fan.
Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? We could find that five years from now the Dual Piezo Cooling Jet may just have completely revolutionized consumer electronics airflow designs. I can already see a few of my old theoretical computer case designs that I’d been thinking about for silence that didn’t work well with traditional spinning fans would work quite the treat with DCJs. They’d finally become reasonable designs. Makes me wish I had the money to patent a few case designs and manufacture them.
It also makes me wonder, if they can move air so much more efficiently, and air is just a fluid (as far as the physics of fluid dynamics are concerned) how about an adaptation to water? And if that works, what about other liquids? From better water cooling rigs in PCs to fuel injection in cars, just how many things could DCJs actually revolutionize? Has anyone at GE even thought through all of the potential implications and applications?
And just how big can these be made and still work right?
Beats me! But I can’t wait to find out.