This Bizarre Fan Cost $1100?! - Piezoelectric Fan
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It maybe not look like your typical PC case fan, but this Piezoelectric Fan is worth its high price tag to SOMEONE. For more piezo-related content, check out blog.piezo.com
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:05 Piezoelectric Definition
3:39 Trying to Break it
4:40 The Advantages
6:19 Performance Testing
7:48 Cooling a PC with it
9:28 The Construction
9:59 Who Uses These?
13:00 Outro
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.
Yeah, I was going to say it's more likely that that dinky little thing just can't handle mains voltage, which is why they have the transformer on it.
Not sure why you would comment that. If Linus wasn't sure about it he would not do the video. He isn't wrong here
Probably that's it, fan makes a ~120hz sound
@@NanoMine Almost certainly
This actually reminds me of the vibrating hexbug nano toys I used to have, I remember I kept losing and buying them so many times
I REMEMBER THESE! I had a green one and blue one. Was awesome. South African here
Those toys were never lost, they're currently all gathered in a forgotten corner of your home...
We only live once so we shouldn’t be afraid to do anything bro, i smoke weed on my KZhead channel and i ate burger king inside target, screw anyones opinion
@@SevenHunnid Epic
YOOOOOOOOOOOOO I REMEBER THTAT XD
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.
Ovens often use it for their clocks
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
@@Bobby11 wall clocks? On mains power?
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.)
If anyone would have a spare of these, it's you, especially one as unique!
I used piezoelectric transducers in my thesis for water distillation desalination. It creates waves , which cause water to evaporate creating bubbles ( cavitations ) . Those bubbles also burst ,which is great because water becomes atomized increasing surface area ,which means even more evaporation rate increase. You can read this water phenomena. It is a huge problem for rockets since it can damage places that has water.
That's some seriously clever stuff
@@Matty.Hill_87 yup it is awesome but now i have ptsd from water leakage 😆. Had to make.my own lap from scartch. Lots of leakage silicone and gaskets. All custom made by me. (Except for ultrasonic/piezoelectric transducer).
Got any links to those research papers. I think concepts very interesting and would love to check it out
we use Piezoelectric transducers to make fog machines its neat. and cheap to make..
@@freazyknight Thank you! You got me interested now
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.
I wonder if that means some cooler fans would benefit from being run away from the heatsink, to utilise the Venturi effect too
@@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.
Bernoulli agrees.
Please rewrite it 😢
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.
same, but I'm a thermal expansion device, not a fan.
pun intended? i NEED to know
Sometimes I begin to think whether Linus is more into tech or more into the HVAC/moving heat
Those two groups are the same group.
@@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?
He's more into house painting.
He's into being hurt by employees, look how enjoyed he was when his employees hurt him. What a kinky dude. 😂
It’s all engineering one way or another
that fan must be really cool if it's $1100
they got rgb
better blow good
...
Dad, go home.
Get it cuz like cool
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.
@@marcmathes41 all of that will affect voltage and harmonic content, but it won't effect the frequency
@@marcmathes41 he clearly states that Linus mixed up frequency and voltage and you decide to reply with a comment mixing up frequency and voltage 😅
@@astroid9924 Lol Maybe you should stick with plumbing 😅
@@astroid9924 Most fluids share common behaviors with electricity.
These are the kinds of videos I wish you guys made more of. Weird tech and practical/impractical uses for it.
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.
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..
@卐-Lakehuntist-卐 average nazi moment
longer blade requires stiffer material to keep the same frequency. but I'd guess a small frequency generator would help a lot with this fan.
diy 3d printed fan design series...? ah right, it's called fan showdown, imagine if he could find a way to make 3d printed blades for this
This is a massive grift of a cheap product covered by action lab. kzhead.info/sun/hdJvobqucHqwe5s/bejne.html
~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.
That’s not Bernoulli’s principle at all
@@crzyvaps he said related to it
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.
I suspect the thermal expansion of the metal would change the natural frequency.
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.. kzhead.info/sun/jKuxhNJ_fHOuZn0/bejne.html
@@CD-vb9fi it's a solid state fan.
@@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.
1:36 love the reverb there, nice job
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!
6:06 Linus no longer just drops electronics, he now also drops people into a hypnotic trance :P
Linus Hypno Tips
@@vmarcelo49 Linus Drop Tips works pretty well already tbh
I havent watched since Linus had to take a break and i gotta say the videos seem alot more fun now. I think the mood has lifted substantially.
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 $20 mil budget to build an office I'd make a wall of these in the atrium with a scanned laser line focused on the plane of the blades to illuminate them making a fluidic and moving diffused light on a black background. But you would need ~ 100 of these for people to really be struck with it, so that's probably like 4 years of production from this fan maker right there ha.
6:30 wait what.... 250$ for a backpack, are you kidding me? :D Is it made of gold?
7:33 The lab team is so good they know when Linus whispers about them. I'm impressed
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.
love learning about these more obscure techs in LTT videos!
Can I say it again that the editors at LMG were trained well by Taran, and now they have been just ridiculous in the last couple of videos! :D
No, Taran was the best and there will never be another Taran.
The video editing is top notch in the past episodes, I wanted to comment this too.
@@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.
@@twizz420 What happened to him? Did he just leave LTT?
@@justinmcgough3958 yeah
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 lot of wall plugs to run all of them :/
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
Probably need pretty wide heatsinks for that too lol. Could be interesting though.
Yeeeahhh lezgooooo!!! 👍
@@tonylarose4842 I'm sure the manufacturer would be happy to help building a power brick for multiple 'fans'.
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.
The flashback bubble detail was amazing.
top tier editing @ 1:32
I love the washer example here. Such a simple mechanical pendulum example to explain an electrical concept. Beautiful
@@dontreadmyprofilepicture5585 That joke is older than the solar system
yup this reminds me of the engineering school days.
@@lucascb8446 you are talking to a bot it doesn't care
It's a mechanical pendulum to explain a mechanical concept. Still a good explanation.
@@Anonymous-sb9rr *physics. or maybe math?
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 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
At the rate GPUs are increasing in power consumption & heat, we may need an entire PC build with expensive fans.
@@DONT-READ_MY-PROFILE_-PICTURE shut up
Yes
🙄They already done that, didn't get too much views.
And an exhaust system to the outside of the house like dryers have lol
...or, build a PC in an AC...🤔🤔🤔
I wonder if you could conduct heat to the "flat tape part" of the fan itself. Then it would be like waving a hot thing around to cool it off.
good idea
And pretend it's a finger that was just burnt " ow Ow ow "
that could hypothetically be wildly efficient, maybe with graphene blades? Might not scale well though...
@@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
@卐-Lakehuntist-卐 Are you okay bro?
Very cool. It sparked a random childhood memory, when I was a kid my dad and I took apart an old Macintosh computer. I remember it having a weird buzzy flappy fan. Now I know more about what to actually was
Are you sure it was actually one of these? Surely not
@@applefanXXX Surely it couldn't have been an over 50 year old technology that costs barely anything to produce on a mass scale?
Amazing test setups! Thanks!
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.
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.
A guy at my college is/was doing his master thesis on that. Magnetorheologic dampers. I think it was something about the control side.
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 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.
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 absolutely love the editing on this. It's hilarious 😂 please do more like this.
I would NOT have guessed that a piece of plastic that gets bent back and forth 60 times a second would last for several decades.
I think they said it was fibreglass so it's way better than plastic for this purpose.
As long as you stay well below the yield stress in a material (typically ~10% of yield stress for polymers) you can get practically infinite cycle times.
They last long, but also they don't do much. if such a fan would have to move more air, like even 1/10th of a similar sized fan, it wouldn't last long.
@@JerryDoe Between the resin and glass fiber, the latter is far more flexible. Depending on the arrangement and structure of the fibers and the resin mixture, the material may have drastically different properties.
@@JerryDoe Are there not resins that exist with steel-like fatigue properties, where below a certain load value the fatigue life is functionally infinite? I'd assume nothing such exists on the scale necessary to be mass produced, otherwise we'd probably see it in high test applications like wind turbines and such
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.
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 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.
Diesel injectors was the only place I had heard of them. Pizeo injectors make like 2000 ish plus bar of pressure incredibly quickly.
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.
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.
I have one of these in a stabilized laser for an interferometer. You can also vary the voltage to change the amount of air flow.
Man those edits made this so much better; nice.
3:00 the rest of the world used 220/240 v 50/60hz not just Europe
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.
@@eddievhfan1984 Plus, the piezoelectric fan doesn't have any static pressure, making it very suitable as a case fan
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
@@freevbucks8019 sarcasm?
5:00 I'm still rocking my Noctua CPU cooler I bought over 10 years ago. Back in the day I had a AM3 socket and now using a 115x socket. Luckliy for me , both brackets where included in that kit waaay back when (I believe around 2009-2010 ish).
Whoever did the linus perfectly cut scream edit at 1:33. Bruh chill, im at work. Im choking while holding an uncontrollable laughter without attracting too much attention 🤣🤣
I remember fans like that back in the 80's. They were meant for local cooling of hot parts.
Considering how old they are and in pc cases we still use regular fans I feel like they won’t replace the traditional fans
@@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.
@@dustinbrueggemann1875 They last a long time.
@@jwadaow Then again, you could overbuild a traditional fan to last 100+ years easily.
@@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)...
1:41 You're welcome.
Okay I normally don't talk about the background music but I love that synthwave you got going on here.
that washer demonstration was really nice! props to the writing team
The editors are on point, the cuts are hilarious. 😍
The editing on this video is great
My thanks to whoever edited this so well
3:27 that scared the shit out of me!
i love the linus screaming single frames. they need to be kept for future videos. even the soundbite is great!
i can't seem to remember where i first encountered his "perfectly cut screams", but I am certain it is one from only a couple months ago
You know Aprime edited the video when you see high quality memes
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.
Back in the day, every PC case would come with a piezo-speaker, which would produce beeps for the motherboard
@@phuzz00 yup. It's odd that Linus is talking about it like it's some new technology.
This "sounds" like a cool video....
I'm so glad you did this video. I've been waiting to see this tech. I want PC Fans of these. COMPLETE SILENCE!
6:00 a better example would be pushing someone on a swing. You put a tiny amount of energy in at the right time and get a large amount of motion.
Holy cow, never expected to see piezo in LTT. I design PZT based sensors and transducers for the medical market. I'm 100% sharing this around the office tomorrow.
I recall they've played with piezos more than once before
Do you also have to tune the blade for low and high air pressure like at sea level and in the mountains?
The editing is wild on this one!
While everyone is discussing on the way fans work, I'm here to say that the edit on the part when he screams after getting electrocuted made my day.
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).
Yeah, but the efficiency is terrible anyways.
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.
There was a piezo fan called the MaxChill which was included with the MacMemory 2MB memory upgrade for the Macintosh Plus. It was actually two of these piezo fans (from the same company) mounted to a plastic frame.
IIRC some more recent research has found that heatsinks benefit from turbulent air more so than a smooth constant airflow that you normally get from fans. The piezoelectric fan may incidentally be creating a turbulent air flow and the heat sink is benefitting from that. I believe you'd have to do a lot more testing than just a quick game session between the 2 fans, as the gap between them seemed a bit much to be explained completely by the turbulent air affect.
I need a dedicated playlist for Alex and his weird sh*t. Best content on youtube.
It would be cool to see how it would perform as a desktop CPU cooler.
in the 2010s there was a study done on a bellow type fan for laptops that movies much more air and more efficiently and in a smaller space. would have been cool to actually see it in products. steam deck and cellphone would really benefit from it. the keys of it was the performance per volume was supposedly stellar.
Love the videos that get more in-depth with science.
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
that lil dude didn't consume anything tho / .+ no sounds.)
@@valerafox7795 it does make a sound, also vibrations, and moves way less air (they are royally inefficient in comparison).
@@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?
@@ABaumstumpf It is you who don't. Efficiency is a matter of context. Is it power efficient? Yes. Is it cost efficient? No. Take a hike.
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.
I love the sound engineering in this video.
Love the laser etching output. Its my spirit animal :)
this is what happens when linus gives his credit card to an ltt employee lol
worth it
3:17 won't work in Europe? 🤦♂️ I can't believe Linus said that. You know you just need a power suppler converter :p
lol, recently started in the NDT field and learning all about piezoelectric transducers and sonic testing atm
I've seen this kind of Peizo fan before. i bought one in an Electronics Knick knack shop in Hove on the south coast of England, (shout out to Bull Electrical) circa 1988. who were a mail order clearing house for bankrupt electronics stuff. they used to advertise in various electronics hobbyist magazines and may still do. they get plenty of wikid odds and ends, many as cast offs from the military establishment. I paid about £2 each for a couple of them, never seen them since. Military stuff is produced at crazy prices and winds up sold as junk for pennies 10 years later.
$250 for the backpack?! That's actually insane lol.
I wonder if you could make the flap itself a heatsink. Maybe you can have a CPU heatsink that's a bunch of tiny vibrating whiskers. The only problem would be find a high thermal conductivity material with infinite fatigue life.
*CNTs:* Hello, you rang?
sooo, copper?
@@someonespotatohmm9513 copper's fatigue life is like 100M cycles. At 60Hz, that's a service life of 20 days. The flap of one of these whiskers probably isn't a full stress cycle though. If it's only 1/100th of a full cycle, we might be in business. My wild guess is copper would last a couple years.
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.
1:31 linus decreased my lung capacity to 25% 😂😂😂 very informative btw ❤❤😮
fan costs more than my entire setup
@@DONT-READ_MY-PROFILE_-PICTURE omg f**** i read the username!
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.
Yup - I imagine that box is more to match the impedance of the crystals than to account for the frequency of the mains
It can happen during brown-outs so by your definitions it "can" be all over the place, just very rarely.
Maybe Linus just ad-libbed that and confused voltage differences in different households with frequency?
@@verygoodbrother Changed one "can" to "might" to avoid using the same word for two different things. Thanks 👍
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
It really make sense that it would work better with heat sinks because of the way air flows with it, it's amazing i would like to see more in actual gaming PCs and multiple sizes of them
I wonder how long before some company makes an engine """""turbo""""" out of one of these. (This would 100% not work for that, but that's not the deal-breaker it you would think it would be.)
"But if I time it correctly" _proceeds to time it very incorrectly_
Try putting six together and synchronize them like an i6 or flat 6 engine to cancel out vibrations.
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.
1:24 "stylus of a record player" Wait a minute, I thought most (at least most better) record player cartridges used either moving coil or moving magnet type construction, rather than piezo? EDIT: And even in piezo cartridges, isn't the stylus usually some much harder material (like diamond or something), which is then attached to the (usually quartz) crystal that's used to generate the signal?
Kudos for bringing in a Steam Deck without turning this video into yet another Steam Deck + something release.
1:27 i remember back when i was just in grade school. We're always salvaging that switch from a broken or empty lighter then we're using it to shock other kids or even ourselves hahaha 🤣
I remember seeing a 3x1 led screen using the same technique tho, not sure if it's the same but it oscillates like this, providing high resolution in height or something