> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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..
While metal printing is attainable..it generally produce shit, surface quality wise. You still need to CNC that if you want a surface roughness not measured in mm
And is not like a 5axis could not produce these fan geometries from a block
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.
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.
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!
Obscurity is otherwise known as "trade secret". It's used when the company really doesn't want to give anyone even a hint of what and how it's doing things, maybe going as far as assuming nobody can figure out the process independently either, so filing for a patent is out of the question. The Coca Cola formulation is a famous example.
Yes, that is the purpose. It incentives R&D by providing a sanctioned monopoly on the result. The trade in return is that the public domain gets access to the trade secret after enough time has passed to provide the inventor with reward for their investment risk.
The problem is the time has been repeatedly extended across the world to the point that society gets very little from this arrangement.
At this point we're better off removing the concept of IP entirely.
The original idea was "we protect the invention so the companies have guarantee that their investment in the innovation pays off".
The assumption was the invention was something rare and hard, not something you could re-recrate from scratch in a week or evening (in case of software invention) or that patent is only filled to cast a wide net to block the competition
> It offers a bargain between society and inventor:for a limited period of exclusivity, the inventor agrees to make the invention public rather than to keep it secret.
In today's world patents are mostly dysfunctional, or straight malignant. They tend to slow, discourage progress and selectively aid large corporation who can afford the legal warfare. They have become also less informative, more vague, so really the bargain with the collective is off now.
You correct, you are allowed to "break" patent law in Germany, if the use is private and non-commercial. This does not encompass schools and science though.
Uh no you can definitely make a replica of a patented device at home in the US. You can not sell it. I don’t think you could distribute the files of a reverse engineered Noctua fan online either.
> Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
There seems to be no exception for personal use. A quick search shows apparent patent lawyers claiming personal use/manufacturing not to be permitted, either (I won't link it here, since it may or may not be SEO/AI spam). If I understand correctly, this is also evident by legal precedent regarding rights to repair (invalid defense).
De facto it may be usually without consequences, since patent violations need to be called out by the offended party. If the patent holder is oblivious, nothing will happen. And since personal reproduction is likely not causing financial damages, you are likely only gonna be told to stop, I presume.
But it's still infringement and consequently you may get away with reproduction, but cannot talk about it.
Honestly, I couldn't believe it at first either. It seems wildly overstepping into personal freedom what you are allowed to make with your own hands for yourself. Especially since patents are now granted liberally for stuff borderline trivial, or not actually innovative, lacking thorough research.
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.
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.
I think they are trying to stop random small shops from making cosmetic copies that compete with their products.
Crude copies with convincing appearance would tarnish their brand. Visibly crude copies stop performance data of such copies from being mistaken as representative of actual products.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
I'm disappointed that this is on YT, shouldn't it be on OnlyFans?
> 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?
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.
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.
> I'm a Noctua fan!
:)
Must be a really quiet guy.
You may find it hard to believe, but I honestly didn't realize this as I was typing :)
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.
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.
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.
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..
Do they add glass fibers, I wonder. That's a way to make plastic stiffer but it's a bit harder to make.
Hopefully not - I’d hate the idea of my fan shedding glass fibers right into the exhaust of my PC and onwards into my office.
While metal printing is attainable..it generally produce shit, surface quality wise. You still need to CNC that if you want a surface roughness not measured in mm
And is not like a 5axis could not produce these fan geometries from a block
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.
just make sure there aren't any rounded corners
But can I clone my lover?
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.
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!
Obscurity makes no sense on a world with patents.
Unless you don’t think anyone will ever figure out how you do something.
Obscurity is otherwise known as "trade secret". It's used when the company really doesn't want to give anyone even a hint of what and how it's doing things, maybe going as far as assuming nobody can figure out the process independently either, so filing for a patent is out of the question. The Coca Cola formulation is a famous example.
Yes, that is the purpose. It incentives R&D by providing a sanctioned monopoly on the result. The trade in return is that the public domain gets access to the trade secret after enough time has passed to provide the inventor with reward for their investment risk.
The problem is the time has been repeatedly extended across the world to the point that society gets very little from this arrangement.
At this point we're better off removing the concept of IP entirely.
The original idea was "we protect the invention so the companies have guarantee that their investment in the innovation pays off".
The assumption was the invention was something rare and hard, not something you could re-recrate from scratch in a week or evening (in case of software invention) or that patent is only filled to cast a wide net to block the competition
> It offers a bargain between society and inventor:for a limited period of exclusivity, the inventor agrees to make the invention public rather than to keep it secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
In today's world patents are mostly dysfunctional, or straight malignant. They tend to slow, discourage progress and selectively aid large corporation who can afford the legal warfare. They have become also less informative, more vague, so really the bargain with the collective is off now.
You correct, you are allowed to "break" patent law in Germany, if the use is private and non-commercial. This does not encompass schools and science though.
Uh no you can definitely make a replica of a patented device at home in the US. You can not sell it. I don’t think you could distribute the files of a reverse engineered Noctua fan online either.
Correct me, if I am wrong:
> Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/271
There seems to be no exception for personal use. A quick search shows apparent patent lawyers claiming personal use/manufacturing not to be permitted, either (I won't link it here, since it may or may not be SEO/AI spam). If I understand correctly, this is also evident by legal precedent regarding rights to repair (invalid defense).
De facto it may be usually without consequences, since patent violations need to be called out by the offended party. If the patent holder is oblivious, nothing will happen. And since personal reproduction is likely not causing financial damages, you are likely only gonna be told to stop, I presume.
But it's still infringement and consequently you may get away with reproduction, but cannot talk about it.
Honestly, I couldn't believe it at first either. It seems wildly overstepping into personal freedom what you are allowed to make with your own hands for yourself. Especially since patents are now granted liberally for stuff borderline trivial, or not actually innovative, lacking thorough research.
Hmm, I recall asking my father this but he’s a criminal lawyer not a patent lawyer.
Wouldn't there be too much error when you both 3D scan and 3D print it?
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.
you'd probably have to do a bit of fixing on a model to get close
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.
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.
Also this would not account for cooling shrinkage, a very annoying problem when making high quality parts to spec.
I think they are trying to stop random small shops from making cosmetic copies that compete with their products.
Crude copies with convincing appearance would tarnish their brand. Visibly crude copies stop performance data of such copies from being mistaken as representative of actual products.
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.
Aren't their dimensions standard? Many people replace other fans with Noctua's, after all.
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.
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!
Tweet with image: https://x.com/Noctua_at/status/2048688184314273947
Example download: https://www.noctua.at/en/support/downloads?product=nf-a12x25...
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.
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.
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.
Mikrotik does this for some of their parts as well
Good to know, didn't realize Mikrotik did this too. Useful for homelab planning where rack space and airflow actually matter.
The Fan Showdown YouTube guy is going to have a field day
Especially because they previously denied his request for the files (even when they've sponsored him), stating the same IP issue.
"Vercel Security Checkpoint"
"enable javascript to continue"
Bugger...
only fans?
repost??