The earlier that we can influence a design, the quieter the likely outcome.
Intrinsically quiet design is much more effective than adding noise control materials after the fact, which often reduce performance and increase cost, heat, power consumption, size, weight, complexity, maintenance issues, and parts count. It’s also more difficult for your competitor to copy.
Intrinsically-quiet design means developing a mechanism that is quiet without the aid of (or with minimal reliance on) noise control materials. This is accomplished by
- Optimizing the process and the component selection for minimal energy waste,
- Tailoring speeds and repetition rates to preferred frequency ranges,
- Designing the product shell to accomplish much of the vibration- or sound-isolation.
Applied to fan-cooled systems
The following design issues are addressed:
- Identify the desired flow rate, backpressure, noise emission and power consumption, now and into the future.
- Improve flow path to reduce back pressure and turbulence
- Improve location of components to make better use of cooling air
- Assess the effect of inlet conditions
- Select air movers or array dimensions that are optimized for the pressure-flow combination.
- Where air-mover data is not available, perform tests to determine the missing empirical parameters.