Dyson bladeless fan

Big Pimp Daddy · Post by **Big Pimp Daddy** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 7:22 am

Just seen this on the interwebs Dyson launches the bladeless electric fan. At first I thought "awesome, that's going to be perfect, no blades=no noise, and the laminar flow will produce less noise than the turbulent flow of bladed fans".
Then I read more, and it turns out there is a DC impeller somewhere in the base, though it is very hard to find any more technical details on how it works exactly. Oh yeah, and it's 300 bucks for the small (10 inch) model. The quoted ~1000cfm for 250mm diameter blows (see what I did there?!) conventional fans out of the water, and it has a "dimmer-switch" style speed control. On paper it looks great, except for the cost...
If anyone fancies buying one and testing airflow and noise, that would be great, cheers!

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 7:49 am

Interesting.

Also, here's a link to an article on a site that doesn't require registration.

cd8uk · Post by **cd8uk** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 11:26 am

And here's the inevitable YouTube vid (via a link from Hexus):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8IH4or_ ... r_embedded

I so desperately want this thing to be quiet (and a lot cheaper)!

ntavlas · Post by **ntavlas** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 6:39 pm

If I understand correctly it`s using both capillary and venturi effects to increase the airflow of a more conventional fan at the base. It`s a cool device I have to say and should give an eerie feeling when working. But that high pressure fan in the base is not going to be quiet, quieter than a high speed 25cm fan perhaps but probably not as quiet as a good computer fan.

PartEleven · Post by **PartEleven** » Thu Oct 15, 2009 8:21 am

Pretty cool tech, but I don't think it's scalable down to the sizes we use inside our computers. I also agree with ntavlas. It looks like it works by generating a low volume, high speed flow that creates a low pressure zone which pulls in surrounding air through the open ring. Hence, the "air multiplying" effect, or whatever they call it. It's probably relatively quiet for a room fan, but I doubt it's at the same noise levels we are used to here

whiic · Post by **whiic** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 5:33 am

I don't think the scalability is the biggest problem but it would be a problem as well. Even with full-sized Dyson "bladeless" (has blades but they are hidden) has a relatively slow sized high-rpm fan hidden inside. Scaling down would make the internal fan ridiculously small.

But the bigger problem would be backpressure of computer case. That device uses a venturi effect to pull more air through as there's a thin but fast blowing airstream from the narrow gap along the ring. The air next to that fast stream, would get caught along with it.

If you were to add backpressure to that, I bet the airflow would start to go in near where the ring is (as that's the proximity of the gap that actually has air blown by fan directly) but exit the case from the center of the "fan" where the venturi effect would be smallest.

Of course if you keep the actual fan hidden inside as powerful as it is but still reduce the main ring size you would cut on free-air airflow amount but get a bit of capability to handle backpressure. I'm still a bit worried that in the end, you would need to reduce the size of ring to around the size of (hidden) fan inside to get it to any decent performance level, and even smaller (as there's airflow resistance in the thin gap on the ring). And the high-pressure fan hidden inside isn't probably the quitest of it's size.

My educated guess would be, that sort of fan would be pretty damn horrible for computing.