The air crossing the heatsink is more affected by the venturi effect with the piezoelectric fan devices than traditional fans. Where the traditional fan lies directly on the surface of the heatsink allowing for nearly no air gap the fan must suck all of its air from behind which is a significantly lower amount of cubic space than the entire surface area of the pieozoelectric fan, the air around it, and the air between it and the heat sink that also must be moved.
@@thejoetandy that is actually why many air coolers keep a centimeter or so of space between the fan and the main portion of the finstack. An example off the top of my head is the scythe fuma 2. I’d bet one of the reasons it’s so good despite low RPM fans is because of that little bit of extra space.
@@thejoetandy server cases made to adhere to hot isle cold isle strictly for data center rows often use this internal to their case being cooled by fans far away from heatsinked components in the case. I think this makes sense for open air applications but once you have 1 inch to move either way things get spicy.
Would like to just clarify an offhand comment from Linus, wall power can very by about 5-10% in terms of voltage, but it is extremely regulated in terms of frequency. In the US and Canada you power will be with 0.1 Hz of 60 Hz.
depends on what is going on in your home. a half-broken fridge or other fans can make voltage dips in your home. add that with wire from a trailer like mine old and too small gauge and you got that honey pot for dips over 5-10% they guarantee that to your door, not in your home. you can have a flux of 5-10% on your mains and in a bad-wired home have a %15 flux in the walls. the read-out will be different electronics noise and what is on said circuit plays into that.
Well in the end you can lengthen the blade to get to the resonance frequency you would loose some hz in movement or transform to whatever you need. Would love to see how this thing works in an optimised environment with optimised suction and pressure side. Also would be cool to see how far you can push this principle in terms of more complex geometry etc.
You'd need a vfd to drive it at different hz. Anyway the main advantages supposed to be that it doesn't get dirty and lasts a long time, no bearings etc. Manufacturers vid got youtube recommended boost a while ago..
2:40 The frequency of mains power isn't "all over the place". Here in the UK (50 Hz), great effort is expended in order to keep it between 49.9 and 50.1 Hz at all times. If it drops to 48.8 Hz (because the demand is exceeding the available supply, stealing rotational inertia from the grid's generators and slowing them down), they immediately start rolling blackouts (the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme) in order to restore it. We're talking a couple of seconds between reaching 48.8 Hz and 5% of the country going dark. It's perfectly acceptable to rely on mains frequency being somewhat constant, and some timing devices do.
It's a similar fine tolerance in the USA and Canada. Consumers would have noticed variance in the frequency during the days of CRT televisions and monitors. Linus is thinking of the mains voltage which does generally vary too much for electronics and is part of why they need power supplies.
Also, even more effort is made to make sure that overall it averages to exactly 50hz, so if the freqency drops and they have blackouts, or sits on the edge of the blackout territory for a while, they will actually run it fast when they can, so that it can catch up.
alot of older wall clocks use the frequency to keep time. thats why they monitored the frequency and if it dropped or went higher, they would compensate later to correct clocks. it might still be the case noq
I have a dual version of this in a suitable protective housing from decades ago. I think it uses 2 piezo blades in series for direct mains operation. I'll have to try and find it. (It was from a surplus store.)
I have one in my fathers BBC micro - on the video ULA - so the concept has been around for a long time - its connected to the 5V rail by the look of it
Worth noting: at 2:50, you say the mains power can be all over the place, but that's not at all true for frequency. Mains frequency is very tightly controlled, and basically never deviates by more than 0.1Hz. Large frequency deviations would cause huge blackouts and enormous problems with the grid. In addition, if that wall transformer were actually controlling frequency, it wouldn't have problems running in Europe either. My bet is that it's just a transformer.
Yep, I too think it's just a step down transformer to make it safe. Edit: Thanks to a comment below, I found the diagram for 120v 60Hz supply and it's a current limiter with surge protection. Whereas 240v version was a bit different to accommodate for the highest voltage range.
@@twizz420 Taran was the best and he probably was so fast that he could edit all videos of all channels if there was Noone else avaliable. But even he could take a couple of hours to edit well a video.
@@Timeward76 I work in HVAC and ive been eyeballing their ventilation in every video trying to make sense of it from a European perspective. so i guess its true?
I think these kinds of videos are a big step in the right direction. I didn't care much for all the lab stuff when it was announced, but if this is the kind of content you're going for, I'm a big fan.
~7:00 This is definitely related to Bernoulli's Principle. The moving air particles right after the tip collide with others and can create greater airflow further away, then it dissipates back down as it gets more and more spread out.
I love this kind of video. Reminds me of the random one-off nonsense we'd have to work with in my instrumentation lab for nuclear inspection equipment. Such as paint on piezoelectric we played with for ultrasound. Nostalgic and interesting!
Now I would like to see all the blades on a heatsink doing this vibration. Imagine a CPU cooler with flat metal pieces coming off of it and vibrating to draw the air from the CPU.
You should check this video out. It is CES with a solid state thermal sink. IT might be very similar to what you are saying.. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YGxTnGEAx3E.html
@@CircuitrinosOfficial I am not sure I would agree with that terminology though. There is no actual fan. But it does create a thermal sink. A fan is either a spinning circular device pushing air through a mechanical action or a flat object being waved to push air like a plow does snow. These little solid state devices use completely different mechanical mechanisms to push air. But I can understand why people would use fan because it is the easiest way to convey the idea, but it's just not a fan though. Even Jet Engines are call "TurboFans" and they still actually have Fans in them. But Rockets do not have fans in them... and they are not called fan either. I would say rockets are a closer property to this device than a fan.
@@CD-vb9fi The product is called AirJet because it creates a stream of air. It's taking the roll of the fan. It isn't a heat sink because it doesn't have a lot of thermal mass that's absorbing the heat.
Oh I can tell for sure that the editors are having so much fun with these new videos. It's such a nice sight to see that LTT is more meme-y these times and is just having fun
While I still like it, it became very unnatural if you compare it to a few years ago.. The editing and the way things are explained is definitely for the attention span of generation TikTok. Back in the day there was some technical information about specific hardware functions, which is totally gone. Only „memes“ (I despite that ridiculous term) for teenagers that aren’t able to listen for more than 5 minutes and if something is complex they completely shut down and call it boring. It’s unbelievable, when I was 15 we where on one level with the 25 to 30 year old people, nowadays it’s like the people under 20 act like being dumb and hollow is something to admire. The government should care about motivating kids to be the future of our free western world instead of allowing them to use a propaganda tool from a foreign government we should consider an enemy more threatening than Russia in the Cold War!
@@rolux4853 The word meme, coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, goes way beyond social-media pixels. Meme captures the concept of “cultural transmission” of ideas in general, where customs and ideas spread from brain to brain. Which means memes have been around longer than Success Kid or Kermit sipping tea.
If you consider it, air is a very bad element for cooling because of its low energy capacity so moving air fast across the system does very little in terms of cooling compared energy required to move the air. I think a low powered fan like this should be enough in relativly cool conditions like this steam deck. However if the heatsink was hotter it would require something stronger to move the air.
I the late 70's or early 80's there was a piezoelectric fan that used 2 blades in a V shape. I think it was intended to fit in a Tandy Color Computer and ran about $15.00 or $20.00. I don't remember what it was called but I want to say it might have been called the butterfly fan.
6:13 with such little power draw it would be interesting to see how many of these you can fit into a computer or some sort of custom case to cool a pc and see about trying to get the same voltage amount used from these as your normal fans would use which in turn would mean using a lot of these fiberglass fans but, the outcome for cooling could be interesting.
Sounds like a super high cost, being they said they only make a few of them per year, and the one fan was more expensive than all the fans they showed put together. It would be cool but most likely highly impractical as static pressure can affect cooling in a case, and these piezoelectric fans create next to none
@@magica3526 The space needed to heat dissipation ratio needs to be compared. Actually some laptop fans have a ton of suuuper thin fan blades. You could have a metal fan and run heat to that! But I don’t know how you could connect a spinning metal object to a heatsink. Maybe with water. In fact, applying a metal sheet to the side of the fan pushing the air, you could theoretically make the air warm on one side of a fan blade and cold on the other and boost the blade’s pushing effect on the air. The faster the blade spins, the more heat is dissipated just like a normal fan strapped to a heat sink. But the fan would probably have to run more frequently since it wouldn’t have much metal to store heat
Back in the day I bought a memory upgrade for my Mac 512 giving it a full 1024K of memory. A fan like this was included in the kit. It was no way near $1100 even if you adjust for inflation. You got ripped off! I still have that old Mac so I guess it is worth more than I thought.
I feel like another advantage is them being completely silent, other than the movement of air which is minimal compared to any fan motor. I wish these could be somehow optimized with a suction/ airflow side for actual use on a heatsink
I love how "Bill of Materials" was so clearly highlighted. We all know Linus could make a BoM quite easy if he wanted... But he would then put himself at risk from dropping the BoM and forgetting what was in it.
You are basically doing something pretty similar to tuning a harmonica reed. You tune a harmonica reed up by removing mass from the tip. You can lower the pitch by removing material from the base.
@@sebastiangiovannella7778 Luckily they're not really meant to. Unless you're scavenging milliwatts or working around explosive vapors, these aren't the part for you.
@@jwadaow If you oil the fans they will last more than the parts they are cooling too at least in PC's... I'm still using some fans from 2011, but I didn't wait for them to blow, I just oiled them like 2 or 3 times after a full PC cleanup, however sadly I broke my favorite Aerocool red Shark fan when trying to open it up to fully clean the build up dust and was fully working fine sadly... To me they are running the same as new, specially the Xigmatek 120mm AEGIR fan which came with my 2011 big air cooler which still beat the crap up a lot of recent fans in cooling at cost of noise since it can go upto 2200rpm, but when it started making the slightest bearing noise I oiled it and it still going like new with many more hours than its MTBF. But sure I had some dodgy fans too which started making bearings noise in no time and I just threw them away as it's pointless to fix crappy fans. ps: buy good fans and oil them from years to years after a full cleanup and you probably will never have to replace a single fan for the whole time of that PC (also some fans like my Xigmatek one are super easy to oil as they have a rubber seal behind the sticker, you just need to remove it, oil it and put it back, no tools needed. I really hate is when they cheap this out and the only seal for the oil is the rear sticker it self, I have a few like this which is stupid)...
I used to be super interested in piezeoelectric actuators because they are able to move things at sub nanometer accuracy. I always thought those were super cool as they are used for fine motion control in chip manufacturing and advanced optics. Piezo's have a lot of advantages in super demanding applications, just they aren't super useful in the average application in a weird trade off.
I remember back in the 90's there was an MTB company using piezoelectric technology in their suspension, the idea (IIRC) was that the fluid in the dampers would dramatically increase in viscosity with a small electrical current applied, which they used with a battery pack to allow a suspension lockout button. In those days everyone was still questioning if suspension was worth the inevitable (though often minor) losses in power transmission from pedalling, not sure how much has changed though I suspect the other advantages won out.
@@jameshealy4594 re: your question about nowadays. Bikes are a lot more optimized now, there's like 5 rough categories of mountain bikes that range from DH sleds that you can barely pedal a walking trail with, to hyper efficient xc bikes. So there's options for that trade off. As well, nearly every shock and fork have lockouts, and xc bikes even often have a cable pull on the bars to turn it on or off for even tiny climbs and descents. Also, we know a lot more about geometry now. especially in the middle of that spectrum, bikes are tuned to have more antisquat and other fancy stuff that makes travel not linear in ways especially good for conserving energy from the small, gentle bobs from pedaling.
@@lilybogusz3576 thanks for such a detailed reply! Interesting that the lockout idea stayed around, not requiring batteries is probably an advantage too.
The surprising thing is they do have plenty of real world applications. Every crystal oscillator is using the piezoelectric effect. Misters, atomizers, and humidifiers also often use it. Not to mention most cheap buzzers and alarms. That's without going into things like igniters. Some of those require extreme accuracy, and others don't.
3:16 Funny thing I just learnt about the place I work in right now. My country's nation-wide electric grid is 220V 50Hz. But the place I currently work at has its own powerplant (long story, but it's an American mining company) that produces up to 240V 60Hz and of course detached from the national grid. It's fixed at 60Hz, but when I said "up to 240V", that's because they have split-phase power to run 120V & 240V to every buildings.
I remember back in the 90's there was an MTB company using piezoelectrics in their suspension, the idea (IIRC) was that the fluid in the dampers would dramatically increase in viscosity with a small electrical current applied, which they used with a battery pack to allow a suspension lockout button. In those days everyone was still questioning if suspension was worth the inevitable (though often minor) losses in power transmission from pedaling, not sure how much has changed though I suspect the other advantages won out.
GM actually uses MR dampers on their current vehicles, and I think a few other auto manufacturers that offer "active dampers." they're based on magnetic oils/particles suspended in a carrier fluid so that when they're exposed to an electromagnetic field they align themselves together, increasing the viscosity. Very very cool and makes me think it could be applied to way more than suspension (maybe body armor?).
I feel this video has left me with more questions than answers. The conclusion seems to be that this straight up demolished a Noctua fan, but tests seemed not very controlled.
Yeah, they didn't really do a summation (I've also noticed they got rid of the LTT intro on quite a few of their recent videos), but my takeaway from this is that despite being limited by economies of scale (low numbers, high cost per item, high MSRP), piezoelectric fans could potentially be more effective than traditional rotary fans in terms of air flow rates, noise, and power consumption. Somebody just has to be willing to commercialize it in high enough numbers to make it affordable.
It has some practical issues because if you mount it on the CPU, it doesn't do anything to cool the CPU because it blows in the wrong direction so you have do a different awkward mounting thing with putting the fan on the wall of the case if you were trying to replace a CPU fan. You can mount a round fan directly on anything you're trying to cool as opposed to this thing where you need to set these up pointing at your parts
Well its actually pretty simple why the temperature of the Steam Deck CPU was so much lower: The Noctua was connected so it wouldn't turn on unless a certain temperature was achieved, while the Piezo blade was running the whole time
@@ABaumstumpf it needs to be only 21% as efficient as the noctua to kick its ass in perf to power metrics. 1w vs 0,2w. Accurate to compare would be to stack 5 of these up against the noctua.
@@Six_Gorillion "it needs to be only 21% as efficient as the noctua to kick its ass in perf to power metrics." You really do not have clue what the word efficiency means, do you?
Note that they could have designed this fan better by not depending on the mains frequency, but by adding a feedback circuit on the piezo element in such a way that it will self-oscillate at its own natural frequency at ANY reasonable voltage.
Definitely super interesting tech. GE made a version that was a disc and could fit in small places but after an initial press push disappeared. If you are interested look up Dual Piezoelectric Cooling Jets.
You can make it at home - get a piezo electric buzzer - attach a plastic strip to it - and play different frequency buzzing sound. - Since the piezo buzzer is essentially a speaker - you can fine tune the vibrating frequency with the naturally frequency of the plastic strip. You can do this all in less than $10. Your Welcome 😊
Yeah, it's not that simple. The drive voltages for piezo's start off at around 80v. There are very few amplifiers with 70 or 80v rails and there are very few step up or matching transformers that will operate across wide frequency bands.
The other nice thing about them, they can also be made into speakers that produce much less magnetic fields compared to conventional speakers, making them an excellent option for magnetometers that are very sensitive to magnetic noise.
I seem to recall maybe mentioning using these piezoelectric fans to provide a much more slimline cooler for the Steam Deck back when you first modified the one in this video - to be honest though, I don't remember if I actually commented it or not. Either way, it is cool to see that it does actually work. If the price could be brought down then they may be a viable replacement for the rather noisy blower fans that were used on a lot of reference coolers from AMD and Nvidia.
Throwing money out the window would generate more airflow, and for 1100 - you can throw quite a lot. But it is interesting to think this has an actual application around the world.
Although most of what you are mentioning is correct, there's a glaring mistake at 6:00... Just measuring input power says nothing about power efficiency... Although I wouldn't be surprised if it is indeed very efficient, you cannot claim so from the measurements you do. You are not measuring the effective output power (which could be a PQ curve, although that would be terribly hard to attain for non-axial/radial fans) so you have nothing to relate that too. Never mind that 'power efficiency' is highly dependent on load. For example an axial fan will do great in a high flow environment, but if you restrict the flow efficiency drops dramatically (this is a domain where radial fans perform much better).
Have you tried 3d printing something similar to the Dyson Vaccums? You can use the "high" pressure created by the piezofan create a low pressure and increase your flow.
No, the frequency of your mains power can NOT be "all over the place". It might happen during brown-outs, but power plants MUST be in perfect synchronization to avoid effectively shorting each other out.
There's like 0 reasons why this piezo dohickey wouldn't work of from any other power source if it were run with a H-bridge and with DC voltage. If you'd run it like that (Instead of being synced artificially to AC mains peaks) you could even tune it digitally by finding the optimal timing between the square wave peaks.
1:32 I’ve done that before, don’t buy the RAW extended electric clipper lighter, for some reason they chose to put the spark gap right where your thumb would be if you light it with your thumb slightly too far forward
"Your mains power can be all over the place" No, not in the slightest! Its very *very* tightly controlled (_very_ sub-hz). Strikes me there some research you guys could be doing, and some videos that could be made on mains distribution.
@@SuperSmashDolls What? Not at all. Where exactly? Frequency deviation cause black outs. Very quickly, withitin tiny margins. The European power grid is a pure miracle.
I remember Radio Shack used to sell a piezo fan 40-45 years ago that looked like two of these in parallel. Think tuning fork. It would be much easier to tune the oscillator in the power supply to the resonant frequency of the fan (dynamically even, three wires) than to tune the fan to 60 Hz, so there's no reason it couldn't work in Europe.
Months ago while building out a DIY car cooling system I sorted fans by price on part supplier sites and these stood at the top. Immediately fascinated with this piezo fan as I've always loved messing around with quartz and it's shocking behaviors, my wallet wasn't ready to stomach a 186x increase in project budget for this. Thought I would never get to see one in action - thank you. If I had a $20 mil budget to build an office I'd make a wall of these in the atrium with a scanned laser line focused on the plane of the blades to illuminate them making a fluidic and moving diffused light on a black background. But you would need ~ 100 of these for people to really be struck with it, so that's probably like 4 years of production from this fan maker right there ha.
There is comming a new cooler with Piezo: Air Jet pro from Frore Systhems. 8W of cooling. Less Air but with 120mph to breake bondery layer on surface from heatspreater or heatpipe. (finding mistakes in writing:Yea i am a non native speaker)
2:10 Open the transformer and mesure the output with a voltmeter in AC and an osciloscope I'm bettting it's only droppimg the mains to about a volt if not less but you will see a spike on the scope for the initial start.
I don't think it needs be tuned to wall AC frequency. It's very simple to create a self-oscillating generator instead. Those are ubiquitous anyway in small mains-powered devices like LED bulbs, USB chargers etc. It sounds fancy, but actually in principle is as basic as pushing a kid on a swing: once the right time is detected, the power is switched on and off shortly, to give it a little push. Then it just swings back and forth to repeat the cycle.
You guys are amazing. I was wondering what would happen if someone used a paddle style cooler on a Steam Deck and here it is. If I could get these for like 40 bucks (not 1100) I would put them in my PC in tight spots to control heat bleed from the GPU.
That just stupid. You can get normal fan down to 2cm - and even those will move more air than this while consuming less power. this type of fan is only useful in certain niche applications were you simply can not have any sparks, rolling surfaces or exposed seals - think explosive/corrosive/high-temperature liquids/gasses.
Considering what it did for the Steam Deck, I almost want to see GN test one of these. I don't think they have a low TDP heater yet, though I think they should to showcase mobile devices as a cooling setup can honestly make or break a device, and to show when a cooler is overkill for a certain build, but it'd also be interesting to see one of these tested just to see actual performance numbers within a validated testing methodology. I'd also be curious to see what happens when you change dimensions, long and thin, short and thick, and a balance between the two, just to display what flow characteristics are like at the same base frequency.
Now someone needs to put a variation of this Piezoelectric fan instead of the watercooling pump. Would be interesting to see if that will improve the longevity of the component that is most likely to die there :)
I've been running a Sharp air filter for 20 years non-stop. The same brushless fan that was made in Japan. It probably helps that it was made in Japan at the height of its engineering excellence. And that the unit was high quality (fairly expensive) one. Also helping is the filter itself which removes all the dust before it goes through the motor. I suspect it helps my HDDs last longer too as the room has less dust.
I thought you used the metric system in Canada, in fact Google says you do. I checked. 4:25 Why are you using _inches?_ Don't pander to an American audience at the cost of science and scientific measurements. MLTTM. Make Linus Tech Tips Metric. 😁
It may be worth noting that the resultant of two forces acting at an angle upon a given point is equal to the diagonal of a parallelogram of which the force vectors are sides. The equilibrant equals the magnitude of the resultant, but acts in the opposite direction.
almost zero record player styluses are piezo. Most are MM (moving magnet in a coil) and some are MC (moving coil within a magnet). The piezo was always bargain basement stuff, and bargain basement record players are not a thing anymore.
Kinda reminds me of how a Reed would work on a woodwind instrument, but instead of the air stream vibrating the Reed to create the sound, it kinda works in the opposite way
I think with 2 of those mounted parallel but out of phase the chassis vibrations would be cancelled out, bring on lower priced variants so I can try that out!
Piezoelectric injectors on a diesel engine use this concept of the Electrical conduit moving a fraction of a fraction of an inch near instantaneously to create almost instantaneous injection pressures of a diesel engine allow fuel to be injected into the cylinder not just 1 or 2 times but up to 10 injections in one Combustion cycle the technology is fast enough to put Fuel in the cylinder in 10 different pulses before the piston has even reached top dead center. i'm surprised not that many people know about this technology. Piezo stack injectors are only to my knowledge found in the US in the 6.4 powerstrokes. hence why you can slap a cheap tuner on one. and it makes an additional 500 horsepower
Even a combustion engine uses piezoelectric sensors. One example of it are the knock sensors in the vehicle. If your engine starts knocking it will upset the frequency of the sensor setting the enigine light
