chriswarkocki

New toys!!!! Thanks Sergio!

Added 2021-03-17 19:55:44 +0000 UTC

Thanks to Sergio I now have a Thermo-Anemometer so I can attain CFM values to compare fans, ducting, and other goodies.

Basically this allows me to get baseline values for just how much pressure a fan has and then use that value to compare it to other fans and modifications to said fans.

So what does our very well loved Sunon fan measure up? Great. Based on a surface output area of 1 sqft we have a value of 480. Yes I know the real cfm isn’t 480 but this value is based on an output area of 1 sqft and not the 0.020 sqft which would give me a single digit value so I’d rather use this as baselines and watch the drop vs having an accurate value but not able to look deeper than a single digit. (If one fan is 6cfm and the other is 6.5cfm they’d both read 6cfm and that’s useless no?)

Now if we duct the sunon which is a 40mm (38mm usuable) area we have a loss of 21% or 379cfm.

For fun I made a 20mm duct because people keep saying you can concentrate the air pressure. No you cannot because if you duct the fan by 50% you get a loss of 53% or 177cfm.

How about the ever popular 4010 noctua fan. With 0 ducting it has a base cfm value of 228 or 47.5% of our beloved sunon making it far worse than a 30mm ducted sunon fan.

So what happens when we duct a 40mm noctua fan down to 30mm??? We get a loss of 22% or 177cfm.

What have we learned here?

1. The noctua fan is extremely underpowered.
2. Ducting a fan will always reduce cfm.
3. You cannot concentrate a small axial fans airflow.
4. The cooling on a lot of printers is just poor and should be looked at as a major issue going forward as we try to increase printing reliability.
5. I need to test more fans and different airflow enhancements.

But wait! There’s more.

What about a standard 30mm fan with no ducting?? I mean it couldn’t be better than a 40mm fan ducted down to 30mm correct?? If we look at the 40>30 sunon our max cfm baseline is 379. The tiny 30mm fan? 419cfm or a 10% increase in cfm using the actual 30mm fan. But wait!! That’s a 58% reduction from a noctua fan ducted to 30mm. And you wonder why people have heat creep issues...