Influent's Products
Influent's new fluid movers provide the highest flow rates in the smallest package sizes, scalability and years of reliable service due to the absence of any frictional moving parts. Our current focus is on pulsed air jets for thermal management, but we also have development plans for miniature air and liquid pumps, and miniature air/gas and refrigeration compressors.

New Study: Significant Performance Enhancement & Power Reduction for Servers with Influent's Pulsed Air Jets This paper presents an example of how Influent’s revolutionary air jet system retrofits within an existing blade server platform to provide additional high precision smart cooling of a 16 DIMM array. Head to head comparison: There are NO fans on the market that can provide Influent’s performance and fit in a server blade chassis. Influent’s air jets consume at least 10x less power than the blade’s on-board fans to provide the same DIMM temperature. A single Influent pulsed air jet actuator drives a manifold design having 65 jet ports, delivering air to individual chips without impeding the chassis fan flow. Validation of a 20% reduction in total server energy consumption.

Pulsed Air Jets
Our air sources enable a high level of smart thermal management by targeting powerful pulsating air jets directly on hot spots and by providing variable flow rate control in response to changing heat loads. For a given air flow rate, pulsed air sources provide 2-3x higher heat transfer than constant flow air sources such as fans or steady flow air jets. While pulsed air sources are not new, miniature devices have not previously gained commercial acceptance, due to either poor flow performance and/or high noise levels. Influent's Reaction-Drive™ technology and high-performance piezo actuators overcome these issues by providing high volumetric displacements in small package sizes at frequencies below 100 Hz.

A Reaction-Drive package like the one shown above, having a footprint of 36x36 mm, can provide peak velocities of up to 80 m/s while generating entrained volumetric flow rates of up to 10-15 CFM.

Influent's high performance piezo actuators alone can also drive significant pulsed air performance. The piezo-driven package shown on the right is 4.2 cm in diameter and 0.55 cm thick for a total package volume of 7.6 cc. Pressure pulsations are created by the flexing of an internal piezo bender disk. This piezo-driven package can provide fully entrained flows of up to 6 SCFM. A production version of this device would have a package size of 5 cc, and further down sizing is possible while still maintaining these high flow rates.

Influent's pulsed air jets can drive manifolds having multiple ports, where each port creates a pulsed jet for simultaneous cooling of many hot targets. The figure below illustrates one of Influent's product concepts for an on-card air cooling system for memory modules. A single pulsed air source drives a manifold which delivers a pulsed air jet to memory chips on both sides of the PCB.

Additional Products—Pumps and Compressors
Numerical computer models have been developed that predict the performance of these new pumps and compressors, after further development, in various applications and with different fluids and piezo and electromagnetic actuator designs. These design tools indicate the ability to operate at gas (e.g. air) compression ratios of up to 5, air/gas flow rates > 10 L/min, liquid flow rates of multi-L/min and liquid pressures >50 psig. Reaction-Drive compressors can drive volumetric displacements more than 100X larger than those provided by traditional piezo pumps.

Air Pumps
Influent has provided air pump/blower prototypes for micro fuel cells ranging from 130 mL/min at 0.4 psig to 2,000 mL/min at 2 psig. The following photo provides an example of a piezo-driven air pump prototype and its measured performance is shown in the accompanying chart. The air pump package is 4.2 cm in diameter and 0.55 cm thick for a total package volume of 7.6 cc. All of our air pumps can provide variable flow rate control.

Liquid Pumps
Reaction-Drive powered liquid pumps can provide Liters per minute of liquid flow and can also provide liquid pressure of up to 30 psig. One miniature piezo-driven refrigerant pump prototype has operated in pressurized HFC-134a systems of 100-200 psig for 2-phase microprocessor cooling, with potential application for use in personal computers, laptops and servers. Please contact Influent regarding the feasibility of your liquid pump applications.

Compressors
Influent has demonstrated a piezo-driven air-compressor prototype for micro fuel cells that provides 2 liters/minute (L/min) of air flow at an outlet pressure of 2 psig.

©2009 Influent Corp.