What is Fan Constructor?

Search Keywords: "FanCon", “Fan Design“, “Fan Constructor“, “Axial Fan“

 
Axial fans are predominantly used in the IT industry for the purpose of moving the heat along with the hot air out of the system. The rotation is along the axial direction and air flow is generated by the collision of particles on the moving blade surface. Compared with centrifugal fans, the distinguishing feature of axial fans is the relatively larger flow rate. This makes axial fans extremely popular for the applications of system-level cooling and ventilation in personal computers and other IT devices. The trend toward an axial fan of higher performance and lower noise level drives the fan manufacturers into a new era of prompt and continual renovation on current products. Therefore, it becomes a great challenge for the manufacturers to shrink the design period and reduce the time for trial-and-error.

However, even for an experienced engineer, the choice of various design parameters of an axial fan is never an easy job. The performance is affected by the parameters such as the hub diameter, span, number of blades, chord length, pitch length, chamber angle, stagger angle, flow angle at inlet, flow angle at outlet, incidence angle, glide angle, forward angle and upward and downward distances. 

Numerous studies are performed on the effect of the chamber angle, stagger angel, incidence angle and flow angles at inlet and outlet on the lift and drag coefficients. However, almost all the studies are on 2-dimensional airfoils rather than the much more complicated 3-dimensional impellers. Until now, no valid correlation between 2D airfoils and 3D impellers could be found among those studies. Practically, engineers need to import the point data of the 2D airfoils into the commercial 3D CAD software, adjust the scales and angles on each projection to the cylinders, generate the top and bottom blade surfaces by connecting all the points together. This is really a great effort which takes lots of time and can never be accomplished by those who are fresh to this industry. Though some programs for impeller generation indeed exist, the number of available default airfoil point data is less than ten and the operation for the adjustment of chamber angle, stagger angle, etc. This is never as user-friendly as typical commercial software. Due to the above-mentioned limitations, the variability of generated impellers is rather limited and only minor improvement can be obtained with these programs.

Fan Constructor (or FanCon in brief) is a brand new innovation for the generation of 3-dimensional impellers. With the popular iPhone/iPad devices , any modification on the design parameters can be immediately displayed on the screen and the dynamic rotation of the impeller generated can provide the customer with a lifelike feeling of a real fan in operation. With the user-friendly features available for iPhone/iPad devices, all the design parameters can be easily adjusted with your fingers and it works as an excellent tool to display the design concept to the customers. All the parameters inside Fan Constructor can be easily adjusted by individual slider bars and text fields, and the user can immediately observe the change in appearance in impeller window.  The resulting impeller will be saved as the files of IGES type which is one of the most popular 3-dimensional geometry file formats. Such IGES file will be within an email as an attachment and the user can directly send such IGES file out to others for further review. Therefore, this means any works done in Fan Constructor can be readily accessed by other kinds of software for numerical analysis or NC machining to obtain the simulation or actual test results.

All in all, a senior engineer can focus him/herself on the development of better impellers with the established experiences without wasting too mush time on the adjustment of the foil geometry or the construction of solid geometry files in CAD systems. This way the company can be more competitive than others because of the shorter time for development. For those who are fresh to this industry or don’t have mush practical experience, Fan Constructor works as a perfect tool for the education and training from the basics of foil selection, impeller adjustment to the advanced skill of manipulating sections. As a result, a freshman can become a skilled person in fan designing within a very short period and a senior engineer can develop most advanced and sophisticated fan models as never before.