Several super-thin air-moving technologies have emerged in the last few years. This one sounds like sci-fi, but it’s totally real.
Computer cooling primarily happens with regular old fans blowing air through a fixed heatsink assembly. This has various complexities; fans need a relatively large amount of space, and they make a lot of noise due to the mechanical action by which they move air. YPlasma thinks it has a better way: micro-plasma actuators moving ionic wind that create enough airflow to cool a laptop while being functionally completely silent.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s completely real. In fact, it’s not even a novel concept. Ionic wind (or more accurately, electric wind) has been observed since 1709, and experiments attempting to use it for all kinds of technology have been ongoing since the 1950s. It saw a considerable breakthrough in 2018 when MIT researchers used the tech on the world’s first solid-state propelled airplane, the MIT EAD Airframe Version 2.
YPlasma, then, is using the same principles to move air inside a computer system.
