[MPR]

This company has created a solid-state air pump.

Quiet, ultrathin AirJet solid state active cooling chips could replace fans - CNX Software

Frore Systems Airjet Mini and Airjet Pro are active cooling chips that are just 2.8mm thick and quietly suck cool air in from the top of the chip before

www.cnx-software.com

 

[MPR]

OK, let's be pedantically accurate and call them microelectromechanical systems then. Sort of like the vibrating clock generator crystal in your computer, which most people would still call a solid state device.

 

[MPR]

The guy on the Action Lab, who has a doctorate in chemical engineering, explained solid-state fan terminology well. He said that, although piezoelectric fans do have moving parts, they still are considered solid-state devices because they don't have any wearing parts. Nothing is moving against anythign else and since everything is vibrating under the elastic limit of the material, there is no chance of work hardening either. Recall that it's plastic deformation that's necessary for work hardening to occur. Essentially, the devices never mechanically wear out.

Note that if the moving part is made of cheap plastic, eventually the plasticizer will volatilize out, which will change its elastic properties thus rendering it brittle. UV damage or oxidation would eventually do the same thing. However, these susceptibilities are not inherent to the devices themselves, nor would they be much of a concern with a high-quality plastic such as Teflon.

I'll let the Wiki author explain this:

Work hardening is a consequence of plastic deformation, a permanent change in shape. This is distinct from elastic deformation, which is reversible. Elastic deformation stretches the bonds between atoms away from their equilibrium radius of separation, without applying enough energy to break the inter-atomic bonds. Plastic deformation, on the other hand, breaks inter-atomic bonds, and therefore involves the rearrangement of atoms in a solid material.

https://m.facebook.com/theactionlabofficial/videos/does-a-solid-state-fan-actually-work/1437811733373895/

 

[MPR]

One wonders if this is a variation of the Peltier Cooler, and the piezoelectric fan is just to move the hot air away from the actual Peltier device.

No, this is purely a fan. The problem with Peltier coolers is that they are terribly inefficient (only 17% as efficient as vapor-compression refrigeration) and thus generate much more heat on the hot side than they cool on the cool side. It takes much less power to move heat than to remove heat because heat naturally wants to move (in fact, technically, heat is the exchange of thermal energy from a region of higher temperature to a region of lower temperature and not per se the thermal energy itself). That's why heatsinks and fans are actually pretty efficient at cooling things.

Thus, one major problem with combining this device with a Peltier cooler in a laptop would be battery drain. The other major problem would be, ironically for what we are trying to achieve, cooling. The fan itself only requires 1 W power. The smallest Peltier cooler I could find required 5 A current at 12 V, which would mean that the fan would have to get rid of an additional 60 W of heat just to cool the chip it was setting on a few degrees.