Comment by egeozcan
9 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?
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
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.
Well, in terms of its design, the patent system was designed to reward what we now call theft of IP, by granting someone exclusive use of a technology that they would bring in from another country. Greenfield invention was an afterthought and some of the problems we face stem from that disconnect.
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.
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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!
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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.
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But can I clone my lover?
Thermaltake already makes a clone:
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/noctua-nf-a12x25-vs-to...
Noctua seems fine so long as you’re not copying the color scheme and branding. Interestingly TT had a 140mm version before Noctua. Noctua seems happy being the premium option.
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 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..
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You really don’t need to 3d scan, I’m not a cad expert and it took me just a few evenings to replicate pretty much the blade profile of my Noctua fans based on photos
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!
:)
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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.
It better have been, considering what they charge and how long they take to come out with new ones.
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.
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.
Wouldn't there be too much error when you both 3D scan and 3D print it?
The 3d scan is generally used as a base for your cad model, you don’t print it it directly, you instead replicate the shapes in your cad software, that gives you pretty much infinite precision thanks to NURBS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline
you'd probably have to do a bit of fixing on a model to get close
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.