THE BLADELESS FAN Electric fans havent really changed since their invention in the 1880s.

Different materials, new buttons, and safety guards, maybe, but still the same technology, meaning the fans blades chop the outgoing air, which buffets the air around those sitting next to the fan. Engineers at Dyson, the appliance company in Chicago, knew a bladeless fan would put an end to that buffeting, but first they needed to design one. So they called upon the companys Air Multiplier technology to design a line of bladeless fans. The line includes a tower fan, pedestal fan, and desk fan. The Air Multiplier technology is also used for the companys recently released line of room heaters. Engineers began their design by forcing pressurized air through narrow apertures to create jets. But the jets needed to be more powerful to work as a fan, said Frederic Nicolas, Dyson senior fluid dynamics engineer. The breakthrough came when engineers noticed that by accelerating air over a ramp they could amplify airflow by as many as 20 times by drawing in surrounding air via processes known as inducement and entrainment, he said. Engineers decided to go with the acceleration of air over a ramp as a working concept. But air intake immediately became a challenge. The fans motor would have to suck in 20 liters, or more than five gallons, of air per second to generate a powerful enough jet of air acceleration over the ramp. The designers soon realized theyd need a 3-D impeller to, in effect, provide the fans engine.

The electric fan looks like a cylindrical column topped with a ring. At the first glance, I thought it has no fan. But there actually is a fan inside its body.

The Air Multiplier uses the fan to blow air into the ring, which is hollow inside. Then, the air comes from a narrow opening of the ring. Finally, 15 times as much air as is sent by the fan can be blown from a large area because of a viscous shear flow.

"When examining a hand dryer, we found that the amount of airflow increases by sending air at high speed because surrounding air is sucked in," said Dyson Chairman James Dyson. "And we came up with the idea of making an electric fan based on the same principle."

The mechanism of the Air Multiplier is as follows. The fan inside the body blows air at up to 20L/s into the hollow ring, whose cross-sectional shape looks like an aircraft wing. The air blown from an about 1.3mm gap that is found near the tip of the wing (inner side) flows along the surface of the wing at high speed, making the air pressure in its periphery negative. Therefore, surrounding air is sucked in.

"It is the same principle that provides lifting power to an aircraft," Dyson said.

To evenly send air into the ring, the nine blades of the fan are positioned at irregular intervals. Probably, it accelerates the speed in the circumferential direction in the ring so that air runs through the ring.

Dyson stressed three advantages of the new electric fan. First, it can evenly blow air unlike traditional electric fans. Second, it does not pose a risk of hurting human fingers. Third, it is very easy to do maintenance on the electric fan.

The maximum power consumption is 40W. The quantity of airflow can be steplessly adjusted. The Air Multiplier comes in two sizes, 25 and 30cm, and the two models weigh about 1.7 and 1.8kg, respectively.

The electric fan has a function to automatically move its head through an angle of 90. And its elevation angle can be adjusted by up to 10.