Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans

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eembedding-shape 2 days ago 35 commentsRead Article on noctua.at

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Discussion (35 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

srott•about 2 hours ago

There is Fan Show Down on yt where people are trying to beat the original Noctua fan design:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHLn2U7i45M_EXIsnqUyI...

egeozcan•about 5 hours ago

> To protect our intellectual property, certain features – such as fan impeller geometries – have been slightly modified while remaining visually very close to the actual product.

Noob question: If someone wants to copy their design with no respect to their intellectual property, can't they just 3D scan?

userbinator•about 4 hours ago

Unless they still have an unexpired patent on the design, it's completely legal to clone. Physical objects simply do not have the same type of copyright protection, and there is considerable precedent in making compatible components --- the most notable example being the automotive aftermarket.

jijijijij•24 minutes ago

I believe the restriction on personal replication of patented designs is a US thing (only?). At least in Germany, you are legally allowed to make patented things for yourself or science to some capacity. The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.

The US restriction is quite mad, if you think about it. Freedom my ass.

bbor•16 minutes ago

  The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.

Is it, though? It seems like the purpose of a patent is pretty direct: make money for people(/corporations...) who invent things.

I guess you could argue that inventors would hide their designs without patents, but that's not how any industry I'm familiar with works; if they thought that obscurity was an option, they'd stick with it and just label it a trade secret!

taskforcegemini•about 1 hour ago

just make sure there aren't any rounded corners

unixhero•36 minutes ago

But can I clone my lover?

kelnos•about 3 hours ago

Unless they have patents on their fan impleller geomeries, the IP they're referring to is likely just trade secrets. Trade secrets do have legal protections in the US, but those protections are mainly about disclosing or stealing those secrets, not about physically inspecting something and deriving the trade secret that way.

Not sure about the tech aspect of 3D scanning or if that would be accurate enough; I don't have any experience there to draw on.

nkrisc•29 minutes ago

If your goal is to reproduce it you could just make a cast of the fan and then use that to make a mold.

It’d be a bit tricky since you wouldn’t really have a convenient spot for a planar parting line, but should be possible.

fecal_henge•about 4 hours ago

I would think so, or by taking cross sections. Its hard to believe they have some miraculous geometry that needs guarding anyway. Maybe they are trying to dissuade people who might try to 3d print an impeller.

3d models for industrial fan manufacturers (Sanyo,NMB) are widely available.

quanto•about 4 hours ago

There could be geometrically tiny optimizations that lead to an outsized impact in noise and flow by turbulence reduction. While optimizing an impeller with computational FSI (fluid structure interaction) is not as hard as before, it still is not trivial. And it's these (perhaps small) optimizations that justify Noctua being 5x more expensive than generic black fan.

fyrn_•about 4 hours ago

I believe the tolerances to the fan housing (which reduces turbulence and thus noise), and the the material stiffness needed for that small tolerance, are the alleged reason there are few copycats. Supposedly getting plastic that rigid is hard. I've tried to find hard numbers and validate that claim, but I wasn't able to. Would probably have to measure an actual noctua fan blade to know. On the other hand, metal printing is attainable now..

zbrozek•about 4 hours ago

Yes, though the fidelity offered by faithful CAD would be both easier to interpret correctly and might even hint at the CAD feature tree.

Kudos to them for releasing models useful for integration.

egeozcan•about 4 hours ago

Yes, by no means did I comment to take away from the great service they are doing to the builders. I'm a Noctua fan!

I was just curious.

dcminter•about 4 hours ago

> I'm a Noctua fan!

ForOldHack•about 2 hours ago

From what I remember from my NASA friend, a few companies, hired a few fluid flow engineers, during the defense bust, and designed fan blades that remarkably increased air flow. ( think profiles like air plane wing ). Something happened and in a few years, there were good fans, and there were great fans.

I happen to own a pair of Noctura fans, and wow! They are great, so I would assume that some heavy lifting was done in fluid flow.

whazor•about 3 hours ago

Wouldn't there be too much error when you both 3D scan and 3D print it?

ForOldHack•about 2 hours ago

My guess is that both 3D printed fans and production fans get balanced, but the production fans have an extra bit of design, that makes the profile sail at both a wider speed range, and peaks at a higher speed.

kernalix7•about 4 hours ago

Would have saved me time on a 3D printer I designed a while back. I integrated Noctua fans and ended up measuring mounting dimensions by hand. Having the official CAD models would have made fan integration a lot cleaner.

ikornaselur•about 2 hours ago

I was just thinking the same! Spent few hours a month ago measuring 120mm noctua fans to build a custom mounting bracket for a rack cooling module I was making.

Never finished it because I kept having to tweak and remeasure, but now I can definitely go back and finish it!

userbinator•about 3 hours ago

Aren't their dimensions standard? Many people replace other fans with Noctua's, after all.

kernalix7•about 3 hours ago

The fan body itself follows standard 120/140mm dimensions, but I needed the smaller details for my design, the rubber dampers, anti-vibration corners, cable routing clips. Those don't show up cleanly in the datasheet, so I ended up using a caliper. That's the part the official CAD would have helped most with.

embedding-shape•2 days ago

Tweet with image: https://x.com/Noctua_at/status/2048688184314273947

Example download: https://www.noctua.at/en/support/downloads?product=nf-a12x25...

fy20•about 3 hours ago

How much more is the BOM for a silent fan like in Noctua? I recently bought a controller for my well water pump, and it has two 80mm fans for cooling. Sounds like an aircraft when taking off and doesn't seem to move much air. I'm planning to replace them with Noctua fans.

Mashimo•about 2 hours ago

Probably best to look up the local prices yourself? We don't know where you live.

There are fans that are cheaper that come close to noctua, but noctua are one of the best fans you can buy.

KeplerBoy•about 1 hour ago

Well the cheapest crap fans are almost free, Noctua fans are certainly not free. So the added cost is the entire price of a Noctua fan.

jasiek•about 3 hours ago

Mikrotik does this for some of their parts as well

kernalix7•about 3 hours ago

Good to know, didn't realize Mikrotik did this too. Useful for homelab planning where rack space and airflow actually matter.

swiftcoder•about 2 hours ago

The Fan Showdown YouTube guy is going to have a field day

caldis_chen•13 minutes ago

only fans?

pylotlight•about 1 hour ago

repost??