- Linus!
This is the most expensive fan in our office.
More expensive than all of these combined.
And this one's $250.
- What the?
Are you sh-(beep) right now?
- No. - It moves like no air.
- Okay. Okay. Okay.
Is this honestly? I was-
Oh!
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.
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- Hey Linus, are you okay to be shocked for science?
(Linus shouts)
- Aw, damn it!
(Linus winces)
Okay. Wow! (beep)
(Linus grunts)
(Linus screams)
I mean, what choice do I have at this point?
- [David] I mean a lot of people fantasize
about physically harming their bosses.
(men laughing)
- To understand the principle,
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- Ah!
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.
Ah!
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 120?
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.
- Yeah.
- Your mains power can be 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 1 or 2 hertz for it to work.
It's hula hoop in elementary gym class all over again.
- Really? - I have no rhythm, sir.
- But your waist.
- What are you saying?
All right, where do you want this masking tape?
- Just right on the end somewhere.
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.
- [Linus] Oh, I see.
- [Alex] 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?
- I don't know.
- It still seems to work pretty good.
- That's way less than before though.
- I wanna touch it. Can I touch it?
- [Alex] You can touch it.
(Linus shouts) (Linus laughs)
(wire buzzing)
All right. We have a job to do.
(metal clinking)
0.55.
- Let's go back, just that tiny little bit of masking tape
and then try it again.
Whoa!
Nellie.
- 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 craftsmen.
- No. We're paying for, 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,
little at its been for a while,
but eventually it's going to seize up.
Noctua rates to their fans
at about 150,000 hours of operation
or about 17 years.
That's not bad.
But the folks over at peizo.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.
And even bigger benefit though, is power consumption.
This tiny 40 millimeter fan is rated for .5 Watts,
which when you factor in the inefficiency
of converting AC to DC power,
lands us at about 1 Watt.
That's about as low as you can get with the traditional fan.
Our Peizo electric 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? (high pitched sound)
Or going like this?
This one is rated for a 100 to 200 milliwatts,
but unfortunately, we clearly don't have the resolution
to measure that.
So, we're gonna 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?
- [David] I can see it, but a black background
might be better.
- You know what? I have an idea.
How about this LTT store backpack?
We're gonna 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 gonna 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 like.
Like it looks like it's fricking blowing these inter-
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.
- Did you say Lab?
- No, no, you're good. You're good.
Man, I could get into incense
if it's always like playing around with cooling fans.
Next up, time to cool a computer with it.
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 our Peizo electric fan be a suitable replacement?
I suspect no, but we're gonna give it a shot anyway.
Alex, how the hecking-
Okay. This is pretty cool.
- You might wanna 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 3000% more vibration.
- How much does that fan make the bomb go up?
- Ugh! That's pretty good though.
I mean, it's barely lightweight, you know? Bud?
- Low power?
- Yeah. Low power,
which is really important in a mobile device.
- You get to plug it into the wall.
- Oh yeah, no, no.
We couldn't run this off of the steam deck battery
'cause it's AC.
- [Alex] You can get lower voltage versions.
That would probably work.
- Ah! Oh God!
Well here's part of here-
No, I'm not even. What the heck?
- Do you know how to hold a steam deck?
- I know how to steam deck.
(Linus screams)
- Yeah. Maybe this will help us.
- 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.
- It's so low power.
- [David] And it's haptic feedback.
- While I tool around and do maternal to heat this boy up,
Alex is gonna explain more about the construction
of our Peizo electric 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 Peizo electric ceramics,
which are just thin little things
instead of putting copper in your circuit board.
You put those in, smack it together.
Whole thing.
(metal clanking)
- Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
- If they made a lot of them could be very, very cheap.
- Yeah, I was gonna say so what's the issue?
It's the precision manufacturing or?
- No. Just they make very few of them.
They actually mention that they really like it
when videos like this, come out,
'cause 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
'cause while on Earth, convection happens naturally
when air gets hot, it gets less dense,
it rises letting cool air, replace it.
In zero gravity though, that hot air just stays there
around whatever is producing heat.
So a Peizo electric fan is a super low power way
to simulate convection.
In talking to Miede 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 cool.
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 100th 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 heat sink?
- Well, but also like our other fan.
- It was off the whole time.
- [Alex] 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 tiny minute airflow for the poor, low power chip
that's going to the deep sea
or somewhere equally unpleasant for electronics.
You know, what's never unpleasant though?
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- If you guys enjoyed this video
and you're looking for an equally, exotic cooling solution,
go check out our war text cooler video.
It's mind blowing.
I still have no idea what happened there.