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Ever hear of a "corona wind?" It can be used to make powerful, self-powered fans of great efficiency.

What we've invented here is an ultra thin fan that blows air without any moving parts. The uniqueness of the device is that it is ultra thin, ah, very small and blows air and dissipates heat without any moving parts. It is very small and compact for use in handheld electronics like laptop computers and other small devices. When we have tiny electrodes with small gaps in the air, and the electrodes actually ionize the air. In certain places those ions move across the air gap and along the way they transfer momentum to the air and that creates the blowing action. Some electronics tend to run hot and require cooling. Other electronics, because you can't put a cooling on them, they have to limit their capabilities. So this will open up designers to be able to put more functioning, higher functioning processors in places they would not be permitted to because of cooling issues. Cooling electronics is a growing concern as the CPUs and processors get more powerful, they dissipate more heat. Moving that heat has become a greater and greater challenge and is what interested me in this problem. The cost target is to be comparable with the conventional cooling systems. The research for the device is more or less complete, it's ready to go, ready to be designed into a product. The technology could be in a product by 2009.

National Science Foundation video

No moving parts = reliable, & especially good for notebooks. More simply,

...A pair of engineers from Thorrn Micro Technologies Inc, Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal, have developed a new solid-state fan that works similarly to household air purifiers.

The resulting fan is the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size and moves more air than fans that are 35 times its size. The RSD5 solid-state fan is described by Singhal as, “One of the most significant advancements in electronics cooling since heat pipes. It could change the cooling paradigm for mobile electronics.”

The device operates thanks to a phenomenon called corona wind. This corona wind is created by placing a series of live wires within uncharged conducting plates contoured into half cylinders, partially enveloping the wires. The live wires generate micro-scale plasma that conducts electricity.

The corona wind is created within the intense electrical field that results from the configuration of the wires and the conducting plates. The researchers say they were able to control the micro-scale discharge to produce maximum airflow without risk of arcing or sparks which could prove catastrophic to electronic devices.

Schlitz says, “The technology has the power to cool a 25-watt chip with a device smaller than 1 cubic-cm and can someday be integrated into silicon to make self-cooling chips.”

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11158