Ventiva’s fanless PC cooler wins Intel over

Around Christmas time, Ventiva launched its Ionic Cooling Engine (ICE), the latest in what has been an unexpectedly disappointing industry of fanless cooling solutions for laptops. But with Ventiva, there’s a key difference: It has a customer.

Ventiva, Intel, and Dell have collaborated on a proof-of-concept laptop that the company is showing off here at the CES show in Las Vegas. Inside is Ventiva’s ICE, which uses electrohydrodynamic airflow to strip about 25 watts’ worth of heat from a Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) laptop — and essentially silently, to boot.

To be fair, Dell hasn’t formally committed to shipping the unnamed laptop, though it casually placed Ventiva’s name on its concept laptop, something that you don’t often see. Intel even endorsed the technology in its CES materials.

Carl Schlachte, Ventiva’s chief executive, describes the Ventiva technology this way:

In a typical laptop, a heat pipe passively moves heat via conduction from the PC’s core logic out to near the external vents, where it radiates into the air. A fan or blower kicks in under load, sucking cool air from vents underneath the laptop. The fans then blow the warmed air outside the laptop. It’s an effective solution, but one that can be noisy and somewhat distracting if not well engineered.

How Ventiva’s ICE technology works

Ventiva’s ICE doesn’t use fans, rendering it virtually silent. Instead, the technology ionizes the air passing through.

Each ICE looks a bit like a PCI Express slot, laid horizontally, but open on both ends. Running down the middle of the ICE, horizontally, is a tiny, charged wire.

The ICE applies a charge, grabbing electrons from air molecules that flow through the ICE and creating a dense collection of positively-charged ions that are repelled from the positively-charged wire. As they’re pushed away, the ions bump into other, neutrally charged air molecules, pushing the mass of air away and creating airflow.

The amount of air movement (and thus heat dissipation) depends on both the size of the ICE as well as the current applied. In a display case, Schlachte showed off a family of different-sized ICEs, nothing more than a few inches.

When asked, Schlachte said that the largest can move a maximum of about one cubic foot of air per minute (1 cfm), but that it was largely dependent upon the current applied.

It’s a different approach than companies like Frore or xMEMS have used. Those companies applied charge to what is essentially a vibrating membrane, using that as means to move air and dissipate heat.

Form customizing laptops to working with Intel

For now, Schlachte said that Ventiva is focused on stripping heat from premium, thin-and-light notebooks at $1,000 or above. Dell’s unnamed laptop, a “gorgeous design,” he said, was to his knowledge “the thinnest it’s ever done.”

Ventiva’s ICE was under development for several years, but the company wasn’t aggressively marketing it as a product.

“We went to LA,” Schlachte said. “We were out with the laptop guys first before we talked. We weren’t even trying to get a design win. We’re like, look, here’s what we’re doing, right? We’re thermal people. They’re thermal people. There is kind of a weird brotherhood, a weird, nerdy brotherhood. And then they picked up the phone, called Intel, and Intel called us.”

Schlachte said that company engineers would just go into a local Best Buy, buy an off-the-shelf laptop, retrofit it, and then take it with them to executives at major laptop companies. “And eventually, they would ask me, how soon can I get one of these in my laptop, and I’d say, ‘Here you go.'”

Intel, meanwhile, was on the hunt for an improved cooling solution. According to Schlachte, Intel was frustrated by an unsuccessful co-engineering effort with a competitor, and heard through its network of partners about Ventiva.

Intel, for its part, said this week that it’s potentially considering Ventiva’s ICE cooling solution as part of its Evo program. Intel representatives didn’t reply to a request for comment by press time.

Dust and ozone: Ventiva’s critics say its tech has risks

In just a few weeks, Ventiva’s ICE solution has attracted some scrutiny and some critics.

For one, the ICE solution essentially is creating ozone (O3), which occurs naturally, and beneficially, in the atmosphere — the “ozone layer” — via a plasma field. Ozone can be mildly harmful when breathed in large enough quantities, however, potentially causing irritation to mucus membranes in the nose and mouth.

When you think about how Ventiva’s ICEs emit ozone, and there can be several in a single laptop, and they could be constantly emitting ozone just inches from your lungs. Well, the worries don’t seem unrealistic. A Ventiva solution that could remove 40W of heat from a laptop used five ICE devices, according to a physical model Ventiva showed.

Ventiva showed PCWorld a draft paper that addresses the issue via a third-party testing lab. Acceptable ozone concentrations vary (the EPA allows 0.080 parts per million, or ppm; OSHA permits 0.100; the FDA allows 0.050 ppm).

According to Ventiva’s findings, the ozone emitted moves in all directions, but is concentrated in the direction of the exhaust. At that angle, at 900mm (35 inches or just under three feet) the ozone exposure would be 50 parts per billion, or 0.05 ppm, with 0.5W of charge placed on the wire, which is close to government limits. (Ventiva also says that since ozone is unstable, it will dissipate quickly at a further distance and won’t be present when the ICE is turned off.)

To play it safe, Ventiva developed what is essentially a catalytic converter: applying manganese dioxide. The compound can be applied to heat sinks or their thermal fins, at the discretion of the laptop maker. According to the company’s third-party testing, it’s quite effective.

Schlachte said, however, that the ozone may be detectable by those with sharp noses. He said that some noses can detect ozone at 30 parts per billion. “So there is a chance; we never deny it,” he said. “We don’t shy away from it.”

The other risk is one all laptop makers face: Dust or other airborne crud like cat dander. In this, Schlachte shrugs his shoulders.

“So I guess the first thing I should say is, nobody has conquered dust, including us,” Schlachte said. “Anybody who tells you they’re immune, impervious, that kind of thing — it’s just not true.”

Traditional blowers can get coated with dust, or clogged with hair, enough that they slow down or can stop working. Ventiva can’t do anything about intakes getting clogged with gunk, but he said that the ICE has a secret capability: “It’s a pretty good air sensor,” he said.

Schlachte wouldn’t quite commit to saying that the ICE can act like an air quality sensor, detecting particles as they fly though the air, but almost. “The reason I’m being little cautious around on this is that there is some work being done around this, that, that’ll probably get announced in the future,” he said.

But that particle information can be handed over to the laptop’s internal control logic, which can decide what it can do from there. Here, Ventiva’s playing it a bit cagey.

Moving ahead

Right now, Ventiva is working with a single-source supplier, though it may add a second soon. That all means that Ventiva’s impact will be modest, for now. It doesn’t have the capacity to go beyond one or two laptop models, Schlachte said.

Still, it’s a step forward. Laptop makers and consumers alike value passive cooling, because it can be close to or totally silent. But they also want a cooling solution powerful enough that it can run their laptop at top speeds. Ventiva hopes to provide customers with the best of both worlds.