Concept fan design

[Hellbeard]

Hi everybody

I’ve been playing with a new fan design concept that is essentially a hybrid of a centrifugal fan and an axial fan.
It’s my understanding that a regular axial fan will blow threw and sideways. To me this means that the sideways motion of the air is wasted efficiency.

Axial fan:

The centrifugal fan is a much more efficient design but usually blows inn a sideways motion inside a casing of some sort like a GPU fan or a car turbo. This means it can’t be used as a traditional computer case/rad fan.

Centrifugal fan:

My idea is that the centrifugal part of the fan will have the blades reversed so it can suck air inn and towards the center of the fan. Then the axial fan blades will propel the air threw.

My concept design:

I believe that if the air is forced to the center the fan, then the axial blades will be able to impart more force on the air as the air pushed outwards is counteracted and surpassed by the inwards force of the centrifugal part off the fan. This effect will hopefully create more static pressure and a straighter airflow through the fan.

The images are only supposed to represent a rough visualization of the concept so size, shape and angle of the blades are somewhat irrelevant because it’s the idea I want to discuss.

What do you guys and girls think of this idea?

 

[Cru]

so, basically this...?

 

[Hellbeard]

so, basically this...?

Yes and no. The Asus Cooltech fan uses the same principle ideas as my design but in a different way. The Asus fan will still create significant sideways force which is the opposite of what I want.

The spinning motion of an axial fan creates sideways force that makes the air leave the fan as a cone of air.

My idea as that the inwards force of the centrifugal part (Force A ) is equal to or greater than the outwards force of the axial fan (Force B ) thereby creating a more focused beam of air through the fan.

 

[Excalabur50]

Interesting concept you just need to see if it works the way you want it to in real world environments

 

[tinytomlogan]

many fans do this already....... Noctua NFF12 for example.

http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=focused_flow_system


also the edge of the Nvidia fan you put at the edges of the std one wont work because they cant bring any air in because of the fan cage. All you have basically done is design a really noisey fan because of indirect air paths

 

[SuB]

I was going to say this will be noisey as hell and won't be structurally sound...

I assume the fan frame is there just for looks otherwise the inward sucking bit is useless? (as Tom mentioned above).

Fans of the outer-ring type have always been noisey, one of the early implementations by coolermaster (Aero 4 and Aero 7) were notoriously loud. If your colliding air/creating resistance it doesn't necessarily mean they will add up to more pressure or whatever either, it could cancel it out and lead to just.. air noise.

If you can prototype this and try it, great, but the theory doesn't seem 100% correct here yet.

 

[tinytomlogan]

In essence the idea is there but a lack of indepth knowledge is where you have fallen over..

 

[Damien c]

Correct me if I am wrong but don't Silverstone Air Penetrators already do this sort of thing?

 

[tinytomlogan]

Correct me if I am wrong but don't Silverstone Air Penetrators already do this sort of thing?

Yeah and the noctua NFF12's as I linked above

 

[Hellbeard]

In essence the idea is there but a lack of indepth knowledge is where you have fallen over..

You are completely right that I don’t have any in depth knowledge about the technical aspects of fan construction. It was just an idea that got stuck in my head and I couldn’t quite get rid of it until I did something about it. It’s also fun to play with the 3d modeling program.

 

[Damien c]

So basically the OP should be looking in to how Noctua and Silverstone achieve the results they do, and then trying to improve on it by providing more Static Pressure or CFM dependent on usage for the fan, whilst maintaining low noise and making them look better.

The only reason I don't use Noctua fans is the look of them, and I don't fancy trying to change the colour of them, and the Silverstone fans I just don't like for some reason even though they are probably better than the Akasa Apache Black's I am currently using.