Why, I bet this technology could even be adapted to make
flying machines that you could foist off on the credulous as antigravity machines.
Seriously, I can see a “so what”, some downsides, and maybe another application to these nifty little corona effect blowers:
As laptop fans (in the case of my laptop, an 5-year-old Toshiba) only draw about 1.5 W, vs. a 30 to 80 W total for the whole box, I don’t think a typical laptop will realize much battery life improvement by reducing its fan power – though it would be nice to make them quieter. Integrating them with the chips themselves could allow better cooling for unusually hot chips (eg: overclocked CPUs), though you’d have to move a lot of air to remove heat at a rate possible with liquid cooling.
The article mentions breakthroughs that allowed the device to have a high enough voltage to move a lot of air quickly without electrical arcing/sparking, but I wonder what happens if you get them wet? Or they suck up wisps of cat fur, the bane of anything with a fan in my home?
Where I’d really like some compact, power-efficient fan is in my home heating/cooling ducts. A lot of these systems (such as the one in my house), driven by a single “squirrelcage” mechanical fan, are hard to tune correctly for the different fan-to outlet lengths, and mechanically noisy.
I wonder if it can be scaled up to high volume applications, such as forced air heating/cooling duct fans?
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