In the early 1980s, I proposed a similar mechanism for ensuring airflow in an asynchronous serial terminal design (3 box; main electronics, keyboard and separate monitor, similar to the DEC VT240 graphics terminal) that had to be silent. We determined that as the electronics heated up, the airflow due to convection was chaotic causing a loss of convective cooling. Adding a single sheet of bi-metal attached to a flexible plastic/nylon blade with a dimple in it and applying a voltage across a resistive strip on one side of bimetal caused the blade to slowly move in one direction, then when the voltage was removed, the blade snapped back quickly, creating a small puff of air in the direction we needed it to flow. Any time the temperature inside the enclosure got above a set point, the process was repeated. The physics and fluid dynamics behind convective flow would take over. Worked like a charm. Unfortunately, the project was cancelled, so that fan never saw its way into a commercial product.

I made some of these 20 years ago when I was a phd student doing heat transfer research for a certain computer company. I made mine out of metal shim stock. I was able to get first mode bending and pretty good deflection, about 30% of the length. My project lost funding because of the tech recession that happened but I don't remember the performance being all that impressive. I did some modeling of a round one like a diaphragm that pumped air through a hole but didn't end up building a prototype. Thanks for the video, I like the flow visualization you did.

A real solid-state fan would be an ion thruster. Piezoelectric crystals vibrate and this can induce failure in other parts, like the electrodes that connect the crystal to a source of energy.

Nice concept! The "fan blade" could work better if it was uniform in rigidity, though. Seems like the tape at the end is making the assembly act as a pendulum, which starts resisting the driving force partway into the cycle. This is probably decreasing the total output by a significant amount, as only the smaller, more flexible part is moving air outwards.

There are also fans that use magnetic levitation bearings and are therefore in principle not subject to wear. But there are certainly useful applications for the fans shown if you do not need much air volume.

Piezoelectric is an amazingly simple concept with a host of complicated solutions.

Just want to thank you for not making boring videos. Every other video is something completely new to me and I love it. Can you do some videos focussed on fluid pressure differences. Like something interesting with tubes filled with water.

Love how you find these interesting ideas scouring the internet and actually investigate them in person. I saw the Peizo fan recently on Twitter or something and now you have a video on it.

I was a fan of the future, now I’m just a fan.

And six months later, we have the airjet at CES which is basically this idea in application at a semiconductor level.

Wow. You're the best. I couldn't understand what you were saying but I just followed instructions. Thank you so much

i love this guy he answers questions i never asked

You have to check out the AirJet solid state fans by Frore Systems shown at CES. They are MEMS instead of piezo but looking pretty neat. Now if they would only let you buy some to play with. Looks like they are only going to provide them to laptop manufacturers.

I’d be intersted in a part 2 where you make 30 or so in series and see if you can beat a conventional fan!

It's so cute watching it move so quickly!

Awesome video. I knew nothing about this before now!

There is actually a company doing chip cooling using this tech as the mechanism. Linus interviewed them and reviewed the device. It looks pretty cool.

I feel like problems may start to emerge if you try to really scale up the concept. Bigger versions may start to get impractical. Though I wonder if a three-dimensional array of smaller fans could greatly increase airflow.

Bro you are amazing for explaining this in such an simple manner.

A similar effect can also be achieved using a speaker, with a small chamber with a directed port on each side, also running at its resonant frequency to reduce power wasted in the coil, and the ports sized accordingly as well. At high enough excursion, the air is blown far beyond the ports without returning.

Action lab guy, you need to make a monthly CORRECTIONS episode llke a popular comedian does, it really engages the audience with comments and blesses the algorithm Plus it's amusing keep up the good work bud

That's really intresting. I was literally thinking about fans being solid state(seeing as we got ssd's) some weeks ago so this being uploaded made me happy.

This guy makes great videos. Thanks for another fun time on Sunday relaxation day for me.

This is so cool. Thank you for expanding my mind.

Wonderful video, I'm a fan of this

There is a company called Frore Systems that might be using a similar principle for their AirJet fan replacement. Cool tech maybe a little too late as processors are becoming more efficient.

Your channel never fails to amaze me.

It's be cool to see this scaled up with more individual fans stacked together and to see how much air you could get moving in say an area the size of a computer fan

This KZfaq channel is my favourite because it makes creative ideas true Btw I was also inspired by you to make my own channel

I read about piezoelectric effect in pharmacology because nebulizers work that way to spray pharmacological substance in the airways. But I didn't quite understand it completely, so thank you so much for making this video!

There seems to be no record of them on the internet that I can find but there was an aftermarket piezoelectric fan sold to put inside the original Apple Macs in the 1980s. It was silent and did help improve the convective airflow since there were no fans in the system from the factory.

Thanks, James, for another great video!

I wonder if there truly is an application for this in computers. It seems like it might not move enough air for something like a processor, but perhaps its possible to stack them. I would like to see how noisy they are compared to traditional fans.

I've got brushless dc fans that have been running continuously for over a decade (with the brief exceptions of power outages).

this made me smile a lot

Great video. Informative

If you could design them to be much quieter they could be useful for PC cooling but for now I think I'll stick to water cooling 😄

This is genius! Look at all the different science concepts he goes over in just one video!

Beautiful educational content. Thank you for going beyond blowing things up with chemicals

Was watching a demo video about industrial cabinet piezo fans. Neat

one day id love to try to make a piezoelectric fan powered rc glider, not sure if it would work but it would be cool regardless, and certainly quieter than a prop

This was a particularly interesting one! Does the bimetallic spring build up any heat? Is it strong enough to cool itself if so?

That's a really cool application of piezoelectric principles.

Nice info, thank you for sharing it :)

i am here because i heard of frore system's Solid State Active Cooling.

I think the company FRORE system Which has the vision to replace the fan from the laptop and use their jet type technology which is dust free Uses the same technology in developing their product.

Pretty neat stuff

I remember seeing an old ring bell made with an electromagnet that interrupts itself. The motion was transferred via a lever to a small hammer that hit the Bell. I guess it could've been turned into a device similar to this one. It works with DC or AC, very easy to build.

Good video, in my opinion, material sciences and engineering such as this solid staye fan, are whats going to allow us to co tinue into a sustainable future. Once we really are able to unlock molecular material printing on a wide scale, i think things will become so resource and energy effecient that it will be nearly indistinguishable from natural objects. To me, this is one step in the correct path for the future.

This is really cool! And it has got me thinking: can this mechanism be used as a propeller or as a part of a propulsion system?

Congrats on 4 million!

I must see this concept upscaled!

A brilliant invention. Are there any patents known? I´m wondering when a start up will bring the device to the next level and sell it?

There are fans with magnetic bearings without friction or wearing.

I was thinking about this application for a while now but I usually end up on a piezo-electrically driven membrane of a pump which drives the compression in a heat pump as the preferred method.

Big fan of this!

Makes me wonder just how efficient these would be compared to a rotary fan (equivalent air volume movement.) Probably not very, but it seems to me that the lifespan would outweigh many other factors in many more settings than they are currently being used.

No moving parts would be like a ion thruster where the only things moving are the ions, which are not part of the engine.

I made a negative ion generator that did this. It had no moving parts, yet it created such a strong breeze that it could extinguish small fires :) .

With help of something called PID, we can use conventional fans to control the temperature by 0.01degree. This also applies to heating system. PID. Good thing

Maybe could be useful for cooling low power electronics like tablets or laptops?

I absolutely would use this kind of thing in my computer as long as it could move enough air to keep it cool and was quieter than the fans I currently use! Thing is, we already have technology that makes rotating fans extremely efficient, incredibly quiet, and super cheap. The amount of power normal fans use compared to the rest of the system is rather negligible. These things would have to compete with that, and I don't know for sure that scaling it up won't have unintended noise pollution.

Actual yes putting these kinds of propulsion would be amazing for phones and laptops

soo cool!!!

Is this what Frore Systems Airjet using to cool CPUs?

I’ve got another idea for a solid-state fan: using static electricity. So imagine two plates that are both conductive. And also, imagine we have some sort of way to generate static electricity, like a Van De Graff machine or a Tesla Coil. Let’s say we apply a positive static voltage to both plates. They will repel each other because the charges don’t go anywhere. Now, let’s apply a negative static voltage to only one of the plates. Now the plates will move closer and closer together. This is because the charges now have ways to move. I wonder if you can use both the piezoelectric systems or the static electricity systems to generate a motor. I mean, it would be low torque and probably won’t work but I think it is kind of interesting.

That's amazing! I could easily see this becoming a super compact fan design for laptops. 💻

In 1990 I bought a Vector Graphics (?) 8086-based computer. It had what in retrospect was a piezoelectric fan. It just wiggled, and moved a decent amount of air. I was in hog heave because it had a 10mb HDD!

No bearings or copper wire coils is amazing if scaled up properly with light materials... Not technically "solid state" but definitely an efficiency and cost revolution in air pumping of any kind. I can already think of improvements to the design that would let you compress/vaccum air too

“I’m gonna show you a fan with no moving parts”. The part moves xD

These piezo modules work also the other way around. I use them as contact microphones in stringed music instruments.

I'm so excited about this tech as it would be great for cooling phones and portable computers. Things like steam decks. Also great to add on slim TVs so they last longer and reduce burn-ins

Your video feels like this is THE solution and everyone should get dozens of these fans right now in their house. You must add a section in the video explaining why this is not practical for consumers so that the video makes sense.

2:38 - No moving parts, eh? Call it no spinning parts then, but claiming no moving parts is just stupid. You're going to get wearing because of the movement and vibration of the MOVING PARTS.

I had one like this back in the 80's for my radio shack computer it was called the Dragonfly had two blades in a V shape worked very good and was very quite.

Love this channel.

Love these videos

Awesome!

I thought I was gonna see how those Dyson ac fans work, but this is really cool too

so cool!

Very interesting !!! Future wind-blowing technology !!! Thanks for the video bro.

great jobs!!!😁

i bought my house over 15 years ago. has a ceiling fan in my bedroom. i virtually never turn it off. its been running for a decade+ total time since i bought the place. i am absolutely shocked how long its lasted, but since it never gets turned off, the start/stop cycles are super low.

Would love to see an upscale demo. Like for a bedroom or something.

Pretty cool! What if you built a housing for it which had a nozzle that allowed you to use the venturi effect to increse the air flow?

Most people wanna take someone they respect out for a beer...I just wanna chill with you in my workshop...tons of respect man!!!

We actually used piezoelectric fans for a cryo-cooler made for the ISS. Fewer moving parts in space is a good thing. I developed Computational Fluid Dynamic models and simulated an array of them. Vids are on my channel from ~9 or 10 yrs ago.

so, it cant break from stress, but i for sure can say it gonna break rfom fatigue, it will last a loong time tho, i did and article on my mechanical engineering class, that every component, moving or not, will break in the elastic zone from fatigue, it is a real long time, but it will, great video, gonna try do some for my amplifier on the car audio system

Yooo last night I started making a piezoelectic vibrator, and then this gets uploaded lol Awesome vid as always man 👍

I love something new ❣️

I'm just happy one person on the internet knows how to correctly pronounce 'piezoelectric'.

That is neato!

Companies are probably going to make these now after seeing this video! It's a unique fan. Would be a great product.

I’d love to see a giant version of this!!

Will see this soon on the Fan Showdown :)

Now I understand that article I read about the construction of future power source via pizeoelectric but I think they need to rethink the whole thing because of the tarmac-repair problem's they need a compound that could be more elastic due to the weather issues

Hey Action lab.Great video as always.I have a question.Why some objects absorb light ?I think this would be a really interesting video

I am a huge fan of this idea

Interesting, but I live in Jamaica, it's the summer, and I need a serious fan non-stop. I can't imagine how something like that would do the job. Scaled up enough, how much room would it take? A giant box that needs casters?

Now there is a company that has this exact thing. I now want these to appear in laptops!