Linus this is the most expensive fan in
our office more expensive than all of these combined and this one's 250
dollars right now it moves like no air is this
honestly I was
this is without a doubt the strangest most expensive most Niche fan that we
have ever seen and I cannot wait to tell
you guys how it works after I tell you how to make money on YouTube PDQ take
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pdq.com Linus hey Linus are you okay to
be shocked for science
I mean what choice do I have at this point I mean a lot of people fantasized
with physically harming their bosses to understand the principles behind this
strange little fan first we need to have a little chat about piezoelectrics a
piezoelectric refers to something that is able to turn mechanical energy into
electrical energy or vice versa piezoelectrics are all around us from
the quartz crystal that keeps time in your watch to the stylus of a record
player or even the switch of this lighter the way this guy works is
there's a spring that compresses when I push down the switch then when it hits a
certain point all that spring energy gets released ah a small Hammer hits
this piezoelectric Crystal resulting in and this can work the opposite way and
turn electrical energy into mechanical movement so inside this fan there are
two piezoelectric ceramics that are sandwiched together one that contracts
with positive voltage and the other that contracts with negative voltage that
means when you plug it into the wall the AC power will make it start to vibrate
let's do that how does this have no specs on it is
that even legal it's fine well what voltage does it run
at 120. this is one these vibrations are
very small which is why the very fact that I'm holding it dampens them out so
much that you can barely even see that it's moving but if you place it in
something more rigid or even hold it a little tighter
oh that's because the blade had to be
very carefully tuned so that the natural frequency matched the input frequency
and it has to be matched within a couple of Hertz Ah that's why we need this
power supply instead of just running straight off the mains your Mains power
can be kind of all over the place to illustrate the importance of this think
of the blade here kind of like this washer on a string if I just randomly
move my hand around the washer barely moves we're not blowing any air with
this but if I time it correctly I can
get the washer going pretty good that's because I'm matching my input to the
natural frequency of this system same principle here so the size and weight of
this blade has to be carefully tuned or
it will barely move which actually means that this one here won't work in Europe
because here in North America our wall power is at 60 hertz and in Europe it's
50. they actually tried tuning the blade to somewhere in between but it has to be
within about one or two Hertz for it to work it's hula hoop an elementary gym
class all over again really I have no rhythm sorry but your your waist
what are you saying what all right where
do you want this masking tape just right on the end somewhere it doesn't really
matter it's like a big old whack of it or like I don't know I haven't tried
this yet oh I see maybe it'll work way better okay I think that what I'm trying
to do is increase the surface area all
that you're trying to do is just knock it out of natural frequency oh I see
well all right there will that be enough oh it still seems to work pretty good
that's way less than before though I want to touch it can I touch it you can
touch it
all right we have a job to do 0.55
let's go back just that tiny little bit of masking
tape and then try it again whoa whoa Nelly now it's almost an inch
that's double with just that tiny piece of tape so we're basically paying for
some master Piezo Craftsman no we're
paying for it they only make a couple of them a year that was later in the script
but like you know now before we go any further this is more than just a party
trick and blowing air by waving a piece of fiberglass around has a couple of big
advantages first of all there are no wear surfaces I mean sure this fan has
high quality bearings that'll let it spin for a while but eventually it's
going to seize up noctow rates their fans at about 150 000 hours of operation
or about 17 years that's not bad but the
folks over at piezo.com had one of these babies nailed to the wall in 1982 that
ran non-stop until 2008 with the only
required maintenance being occasional dusting oh yeah and actually it was
still fine after those 26 years they just moved offices and figured the poor
thing had had enough another key Advantage is dust management if you were
in a clean room for instance and you had a fan like this running it would shed
tiny Trace Amounts of oil and dust into the surrounding environment this on the
other hand sheds absolutely nothing an even bigger benefit though is power
consumption this tiny 40 millimeter fan is rated for 0.5 Watts which when you
factor in the inefficiency of converting AC to DC power lands us at about one
Watt that's about as low as you can get with a traditional fan our piezoelectric
fan on the other hand gets most of its motion from hitting that natural
frequency making it incredibly power efficient I mean think back to our
washer again what's more efficient going like this
or going like this this one is rated for 100 to 200 milliwatts but unfortunately
we clearly don't have the resolution to measure that so we're going to move on
to our next station which is testing its performance compared to this boy can you
see this okay or do we need a black background here see it but black background might be better you know what
I have an idea how about this LTT Store backpack we're going to have four waves
of availability in the coming weeks so make sure you get your order in so that
you are in the queue
oh wow it really goes doesn't it I
didn't think I was going to get that much airflow out of it you can really see a night and day difference between
it being slightly behind the fiberglass
Reed and then right next to it so that's clearly where the intake is like right
along the sides here that's so bizarre
the air current is so much greater than what it feels feels like
be freaking blowing this into I can't even feel it in my notes it says it has
essentially zero static pressure and needs free air around it to bring in
it's not actually like a normal fan but this still even though I'm reading that
off a teleprompter I don't get it how can something blow this much air and yet
I cannot feel it at all like there's no pressure like I can but barely okay well
let's just compare it to this sure a 40 millimeter it's gonna get absolutely
annihilated Noctua would never let us down yeah my cost performance analysis
is that this is probably better for most things
don't need the lab to tell me that no no you're good you're good
yeah I could get into incense if it's always like playing around with cooling
fans you're with it uh technically the steam
deck is a computer and it is one that we already managed excellent results with
using a 40 millimeter cooling fan so will rpa's electric fan be a suitable
replacement I suspect no but
um we're gonna give it a shot anyway Alex how the hecking okay this is pretty cool
I might want to turn it off first no no it seems fine I'm turning it off yeah
that's probably for the best you don't need to undo it that much I had it undone so it would be like perfect you
could have just slotted it right in oh valve steam deck now with three thousand
percent more vibration how much does that fan make the bomb go up Ah that's
pretty good though I mean it's uh fairly lightweight you know bud low power yeah
low power which is really important in a in a mobile device you get to plug it
into the wall oh yeah no no we couldn't run this off of this steam deck battery
because it's AC you can get lower voltage versions that would probably
work back oh God so there's part of here
no I'm not even what that do you know how to hold a steam bag okay yeah maybe
this one oh my God Alex you knew you were gonna do this didn't you oh my God
okay let's not do that you just clamped onto the screen of a steam deck do you
know how few working steam decks there are in the wild none work better than
this one so don't ruin it this is the
best cooling solution we've ever had on this steam deck it's the worst one so
low power while I tool around and do maternal to
heat this boy up Alex is going to explain more about the construction of
our piezoelectric fan our goal is less than 63 degrees which is what we got
with our 40 millimeter Noctua it's basically just a circuit board fiberglass you have your two
piezoelectric Ceramics which are just thin little things instead of putting
copper in your circuit board you put those in smack it together whole thing
sorry I didn't mean to interrupt if they made a lot of them could be very very
cheap yeah I was going to say so what's the issue it's the Precision manufacturing or no uh just they make
very few of them they actually mentioned that they really like it when videos like this come out because a bunch of
people buy them just for tooling around with them like us apparently there are a
few on the space station which is pretty cool because while on Earth convection
happens naturally when air gets hot it gets less dense it rises letting cooler
replace it in zero gravity though that hot air just stays there around whatever
is producing heat so a piezoelectric fan is a super low power way to simulate
convection in talking to me day though they were like yeah we have some fans
deployed for zero gravity but those volumes are so low it can hardly allow
you to run a business fair enough quite a few then are also
used for sensors like temperature sensors smoke detectors chemical
detectors and so on and so forth by gently moving air across the sensor you
can significantly reduce how long it takes for something to get detected and
once again the super low power draw means that a sensing unit can be battery
powered one other benefit this fan has over a traditional fan is the start and
stop time it is blowing air within
milliseconds of being powered on and stops almost instantly when power is
removed and one situation this can be very useful is for lasers this is the
chiller that keeps our laser tube cooled but even though it keeps our laser tube
within a couple of degrees on etching jobs a couple of degrees can be enough
to noticeably change the darkness of the Etch in some highly Advanced lasers then
they'll have both heaters and these fans
to control the temperature to within one hundredths of a degree and finally they
do get used to cool Electronics just not
in this application now we actually maxed out at 50 degrees Celsius on our
CPU I have no idea how that works maybe
we're utilizing more of the heatsink well but also like our other fan it was
off the whole time oh damn yeah like it's actually working pretty well
normally not in an application like this though normally in a sealed container
just to create a any bit of airflow for the poor low power chip that's going to
the deep sea or somewhere equally unpleasant for electronics you know
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enjoyed this video and you're looking for an equally exotic cool solution go
check out our Vortex cooler video it's mind-blowing I still have no idea what
happened there