Question AirJet cooling for Laptop chips!

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soresu

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2014
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Which is marketing nonsense. I can reverse a fan and it doesn't "blast out the dust"
Fan motion doesn't really stop the dust collecting on heatsink fins in the first place given build up seems inevitable in all fan based systems I have seen.

Part of that I think maybe the fact that most fans cannot overcome the boundary layer effect preventing airflow from directly affecting the surface of the heatsink - this being one of the chief claims Frore makes their jet impingement generating MEMS arrays (the core of the AirJet product) is capable of.
 

mindless1

Diamond Member
Aug 11, 2001
8,583
1,665
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The difference is that the AirJet has a gazillion times the pressure of a fan.
All the deeper to suck the dust IN, then once it has deposited, all the more it impedes blowing it OUT. This rate of clogging can of course be mitigated by ample filter area, but that takes up space, and still aligns with the idea of disposable hardware which combined with the marketing about losing performance, seems the best fit for high end phones with huge/heavy batteries to support this higher performance (heat=battery drain).

You might be able to remove the components, use an air compressor and/or ultrasonic bath to clean them, both things that the average computer owner will not do, especially not on a phone or tablet where their advantages make a little sense.

I'm more than happy to stick with a passively cooled phone. Performance is already good enough for most real world uses.
 

yottabit

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2008
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soresu

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2014
3,689
3,026
136
“at heart the reality is that cooling technology has not changed in 40+ years”

Sure I remember using a phase change vapor-chamber based heatsink with 6 heat pipes, and quad 140 mm silent brushless pulse-width modulated Noctua fans on my 80286, wasn’t everyone?
The same basic reliance on rotating fans with an electromagnetic motor to spin them for air cooling solutions is probably what they mean even if they are being disingenuous about the heat transfer mechanisms from the processors to the fans.

Still a fundamental flaw in the whole heat pipe paradigm is how little surface area actually comes into contact with the fins they are threaded through.

It feels like if every heat pipe could end in a separate super flat vapor chamber instead of fins then the entire solution could be more efficient.
 
Jul 27, 2020
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So is that approach better than Frore's AirJets?
Possibly. It can scale up to 30W heat dissipation while AirJet is limited to about 5W (would need 6 of them stacked to match). They don't claim to be dustproof like Airjet though.


One important distinction is that venting the heat outside is the responsibility of the laptop OEM with AirJet.


Ventiva also claims to enable thinner, lighter devices whereas AirJet aims to just replace fans in existing form factors.
 
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Jul 27, 2020
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yottabit

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2008
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668
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The same basic reliance on rotating fans with an electromagnetic motor to spin them for air cooling solutions is probably what they mean even if they are being disingenuous about the heat transfer mechanisms from the processors to the fans.

Still a fundamental flaw in the whole heat pipe paradigm is how little surface area actually comes into contact with the fins they are threaded through.

It feels like if every heat pipe could end in a separate super flat vapor chamber instead of fins then the entire solution could be more efficient.
Ionic propulsion and jet impingement cooling are tech that has been around a very long time too in aerospace. Just no one ever decided to create cool marketing buzzwords and stick it in a smartphone.

Heat pipes weren’t seeing widespread use in consumer electronics until the mid to late 1990s when they started popping up in laptops. So it’s totally disingenuous to say the tech hasn’t changed. What about AIO liquid cooling which is fairly mainstream now? Sure there were some mainframes that were liquid cooled, but it wasn’t in mainstream market until the 2000s.

And even the argument it’s some different type of physics is flawed - both the AirJet and this Ionic Whatever Engine are both still blowing air. I personally think heat pipes and vapor chambers were a revolutionary advance in thermal design. But anyway I don’t know why I’m so ornery about it, I’m sure some random tech blogger doesn’t know any better, if the article was even written by a human
 
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yottabit

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2008
1,580
668
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My fundamental issue is that the advancements in packaging these technologies and manufacturing methods like MEMS are really exciting on their own. So why do these companies (and to a larger degree is the tech media) always have to mix in the actual advancement with grandiose and clearly false claims? As soon as I read some BS on the marketing it makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
 

soresu

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2014
3,689
3,026
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Just no one ever decided to create cool marketing buzzwords and stick it in a smartphone
Create cool marketing buzzwords =/= non sensor type MEMS tech maturity (for AirJet), something that wasn't possible until much more recently for these use cases, as backed up by the recent surge in MEMS speakers also.

I'm plenty dubious about Frore's claims though given both LTT and others have noted AirJet is in fact fairly audible already even in its 1st gen form.

We'll have to see if future iterations can lower the noise, or at least not make it worse while increasing the cooling effect.

My guess would be not - or at least perhaps requiring acoustic metamaterials to mask the noise (something I find a more interesting subject area for PC cooling anyway).

I also remember the IT world being abuzz about ionic cooling years ago, and then it sank without a trace, possibly because it runs too high a risk of static damage to the PCB and silicon.
 

soresu

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2014
3,689
3,026
136
Heat pipes weren’t seeing widespread use in consumer electronics until the mid to late 1990s when they started popping up in laptops. So it’s totally disingenuous to say the tech hasn’t changed
Not a point I was getting at - I meant the way of producing the airflow hadn't changed much in terms of mainstream use beyond the humble fan.

I do agree heat pipes were definitely a significant change, I even remember my first heat pipe HSF back in the mid 00s.

I heard of 'pulsating heat pipes' as a more hardcore variant of the technology first developed in the 90s - I wonder if they could come into ICT in the next 20 years 🤔
 

yottabit

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2008
1,580
668
146
Create cool marketing buzzwords =/= non sensor type MEMS tech maturity (for AirJet), something that wasn't possible until much more recently for these use cases, as backed up by the recent surge in MEMS speakers also.

I'm plenty dubious about Frore's claims though given both LTT and others have noted AirJet is in fact fairly audible already even in its 1st gen form.

We'll have to see if future iterations can lower the noise, or at least not make it worse while increasing the cooling effect.

My guess would be not - or at least perhaps requiring acoustic metamaterials to mask the noise (something I find a more interesting subject area for PC cooling anyway).

I also remember the IT world being abuzz about ionic cooling years ago, and then it sank without a trace, possibly because it runs too high a risk of static damage to the PCB and silicon.
At MEMS scale I wonder if they could just push the frequency range up outside of human hearing range. Would be interesting. Don’t worry about your pets going crazy everytime your phone warms up

I haven’t heard a great audio recording of one of those but I imagine most of the noise is from the high velocity air
 
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Doug S

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2020
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Looks like Frore has attracted some competition from the MEMS speaker crowd....


Smartphones? They'd need to have places for air to enter and exit to make it actually cool the device, and I can't see that being viable.

The openings would have to be pretty small for the surface tension of water to keep it out. but such a small opening isn't going to allow for enough airflow to any real amount of cooling. Who's going to redesign a phone to get it 0.5C cooler?

Plus it's liable to get clogged up pretty easily. Lightning ports get a lot of lint if you keep your phone in your pocket often - it is amazing how much lint you can pull out of there if you dig in with a pin. Those much tinier air inlets would clog up with pocket lint before long, then those MEMs fans are useless. Dust is often statically charged so it'll get in there and stick even with an exit available. Or worse, if you were around some conductive dust (fine metal dust from an angle grinder perhaps) who knows what that does to your phone?

This is a stupid idea, at least as far as smartphones and tablets go.
 

dullard

Elite Member
May 21, 2001
25,696
4,223
126
Smartphones? They'd need to have places for air to enter and exit to make it actually cool the device, and I can't see that being viable.

The openings would have to be pretty small for the surface tension of water to keep it out. but such a small opening isn't going to allow for enough airflow to any real amount of cooling. Who's going to redesign a phone to get it 0.5C cooler?

Plus it's liable to get clogged up pretty easily. Lightning ports get a lot of lint if you keep your phone in your pocket often - it is amazing how much lint you can pull out of there if you dig in with a pin. Those much tinier air inlets would clog up with pocket lint before long, then those MEMs fans are useless. Dust is often statically charged so it'll get in there and stick even with an exit available. Or worse, if you were around some conductive dust (fine metal dust from an angle grinder perhaps) who knows what that does to your phone?

This is a stupid idea, at least as far as smartphones and tablets go.
For reference, it is IP-58 rated for dust and water ingress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_code
  • First digit 5: "Ingress of dust is not entirely prevented, but it must not enter in sufficient quantity to interfere with the safe operation of the equipment."
  • Second digit 8: "The equipment is suitable for continuous immersion in water under conditions which the manufacturer shall specify. However, with certain types of equipment, it can mean that water can enter but only so that it produces no harmful effects."
Quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, 39 cc/s of air would cool maybe 0.3 W of power. The actual cooling depends on a lot like chip temperature, heat transfer coefficient, and venting design. But, that is a rough number. Since a SOC may use ~1 W, it could drop temperature rise by 1/3rd. Maybe up to 5°C cooler in the extreme cases. More likely 2°C to 3°C in more practical use cases.
 
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MadRat

Lifer
Oct 14, 1999
11,961
278
126
MEMS is built more on fluid dynamics than what you think of as a fan. It can be configured in more than one way, conceivably as either a radiant emitter or more as a directional linear accelerator. The former would be optimal for centralized hotspots. The latter for optimization of thermal radiation along edges. So it will take design decisions by the chipmaker to work optimally.

The technology might not even be best suited on chips themselves. What stops someone from placing MEMS on the lowest part of each fin, where the heat exchange is optimal?
 
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