Hacker News

Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans

34 points by embedding-shape 3 days ago | 6 comments

egeozcan 38 minutes 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?

fecal_henge 22 minutes 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 12 minutes 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.

zbrozek 24 minutes 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 8 minutes 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.

embedding-shape 3 days ago

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

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