If you didn’t know any better, you might think it’s magic.
David Garcia gave TechCrunch a demo video demonstration of a device developed by his company, Yplasma. A row of five candles sit in front of a harmonica-like device with wires hanging off it. Suddenly, the flames flicker and then snuff out.
Inside the device, two strips of copper coursing with electrical current are generating plasmas, or clouds of charged particles, that induce airflow through the cavity and out over the candles.
It’s nothing a fan couldn’t do, but Yplasma’s actuator has no moving parts, and the strips are thin and flexible.
“It’s cheap to manufacture, is very thin, so it fits everywhere, and also consumes very little energy,” Garcia told TechCrunch.
A small fan in a laptop might use 3 to 4 watts, Garcia said, but Yplasma’s actuator would only use 1 watt to cool the same amount. Plus, its flexible form factor means it’s easier to fit in increasingly space-constrained consumer electronics.
Those qualities have caught the attention of a major semiconductor manufacturer, he said.
To refine its actuators, Yplasma recently raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Faber with participation from SOSV, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. As part of the deal, Yplasma will run its research and development out of SOSV’s Hax lab space in Newark, New Jersey, and offices in Madrid. The company was spun out of Spain’s space agency, INTA.
The ability to manipulate air using nothing but electrical forces has a wide range of applications. Based on Yplasma’s website, that could include vehicle aerodynamics, satellite propulsion, aircraft deicing, water harvesting, and more.
In fact, the startup’s initial target market was wind turbines. There, being able to control airflow and reduce drag can boost the amount of electricity one generates by 10% to 15%, Garcia said. Plus, the plasma actuators can also be configured to generate heat, helping to de-ice turbine blades.
“In North America and other parts of the world, ice is a problem. For wind turbines, 20% of the energy is lost because of that,” he said.
Yplasma is still working on a product for wind turbines, and it’s going to deploy a test at Sandia National Laboratory this summer. But Garcia said that after a project with the semiconductor manufacturer proved successful, Yplasma started devoting more attention to chip cooling.
The company is closely studying the data center market, too. Cooling is one of the biggest non-compute expenses in a data center, so improving the effectiveness and efficiency would help bolster the bottom line.
“There’s nothing between fans and liquid cooling or immersive cooling, and immersive and liquid cooling is super expensive,” Garcia said. “They’re hungry for cooling solutions.”
