Noiseless Plasma Cooling May Be The Next Big Laptop Breakthrough At CES

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. However, the classical method to produce ionic wind is through a method called "corona discharge", which has various issues that largely prohibit its use in consumer devices. Most particularly, corona discharge creates quite a bit of ozone, which is a lung irritant.

YPlasma says its plasma actuator device, which it calls a "Dielectric Barrier Discharge", solves this problem with the eponymous dielectric barrier. The company hasn't explained exactly how it works yet, but our presumption is that by placing this barrier between the electrodes, it prevents an arc from forming, which is what creates most of the ozone.


It's not clear how this impacts the DBD plasma actuator's ability to move air, nor if it changes the power characteristics of the devices, which are historically quite significant for ionic wind-based air movers. While they don't draw that much power, they do require voltages in the kilovolt range, which means implementation will be significantly more complex than with a regular fan, or one of Frore's AirJet systems.


Indeed, the comparison against Frore's AirJets is probably the most salient discussion about this technology. Where the AirJets are around 2.5mm thick—already quite a bit thinner than regular fans—the DBD plasma actuator can be deployed as a 200-micron-thin film, which means it can be placed almost anywhere, including on the heatsink itself.

Both are silent, and it's not clear which one will use more power, but the AirJet does have one distinct advantage over plasma actuators, and it's static pressure. Ionic wind devices historically struggle with this; even the largest examples (which can move quite a bit of air) struggle with static pressure, which is a critical characteristic for cooling. Meanwhile, Frore's AirJet can produce pressures on the order of 1,000 pascals, more than ten times typical laptop blowers.

We're deeply curious to see if YPlasma has indeed solved the issues with earlier ionic wind devices. The company is exhibiting at CES this year, so we'll have to see if we can make time to stop by the booth and check out DBD plasma actuators for ourselves.