Sterrox® liquid-crystal polymer (LCP)

AAO Frame

Our AAO (Advanced Acoustic Optimisation) frames feature integrated anti-vibration pads as well as our proprietary Stepped Inlet Design and Inner Surface Microstructures, both of which further refine the fan’s performance/noise efficiency.

Anti-Stall Knobs

The NF-S12A’s Anti-Stall Knobs reduce flow separation phenomena in medium to high impedance situations and thereby increase the fan’s stall margin. This means that the NF-S12A is even more versatile than its renowned predecessor and can achieve better performance on heatsinks and radiators.

Bevelled Blade Tips

Reducing critical rotor stator interaction, the NF-S12B's and NF-B9's Bevelled Blade Tips permit to combine a higher blade surface area with quieter operation and thus form a cornerstone of the fans' outstanding efficiency.

Flow Acceleration Channels

By speeding up the airflow at the crucial outer blade regions, Flow Acceleration Channels reduce suction side flow separation and thus lead to better efficiency and lower vortex noise.

Focused Flow™ Frame

Designed for pressure demanding applications such as heatsinks and radiators, the Focused Flow™ frame features eleven stator guide vanes that straighten, channel and focus the airflow, which allows the NF-F12 to rival the performance of conventional fans running at much faster speeds.

Inner Surface Microstructures

With the tips of the fan blades ploughing through the boundary layer created by the Inner Surface Microstructures, flow separation from the suction side of the blades is significantly suppressed, which results in reduced blade passing noise and improved airflow and pressure efficiency.

Metal bearing shell

In order to guarantee the highest possible degree of manufacturing precision, minimum tolerance and excellent long-term stability, our newest 120 and 140mm fans sport a CNC milled bearing shell made entirely from brass.

Custom-designed PWM IC with SCD

Our custom-designed NE-FD1 PWM IC integrates our Smooth Commutation Drive (SCD) technology. By providing smoother torque impulses, SCD suppresses PWM switching noises and thus makes the fan quieter at low speeds.

Smooth Commutation Drive

The latest version of our advanced Smooth Commutation Drive system ensures superb running smoothness by eliminating torque variations and switching noises. This makes our fans remarkably quiet even at very close distances.

SSO-Bearing

Combining the proven concept of hydrodynamic bearing with an additional magnet that supports the self-stabilisation of the rotor axis, our time-tested SSO-Bearing technology has become synonymous with supremely quiet operation and exceptional long-term stability.

SSO2 Bearing

SSO2 is the further optimised second generation of our renowned, time-tested SSO bearing. With SSO2, the rear magnet is placed closer to the axis to provide even better stabilisation, precision and durability.

Stepped Inlet Design

Our Stepped Inlet Design adds turbulence to the influx in order to facilitate the transition from laminar flow to turbulent flow, which reduces tonal intake noise, improves flow attachment and increases suction capacity, especially in space restricted environments.

Vortex-Control Notches

Vortex-Control Notches split up trailing edge vortices and thus spread the fan’s noise emission over a wider range of frequencies. This measure makes the fan sound more pleasant to the human ear.

Sterrox® liquid-crystal polymer (LCP)

Noctua’s novel Sterrox® liquid-crystal polymer (LCP) compound features extreme tensile strength, an exceptionally low thermal expansion coefficient and dampening characteristics that are ideal for reducing resonance and vibration phenomena in advanced fan-blade designs.

etaPERF™ motor

Noctua’s new etaPERF™ motor sets new standards in energy efficiency thanks to its extremely low electric impedance and the latest NE-FD6 drive system with its integrated, ultra-sensitive Hall effect sensor that provides super-precise commutation performance. This not only enables it to convert a minimal electric input into a maximum power-output with hardly any losses, but also works in tandem with Noctua’s proven Smooth Commutation Drive 2 technology to make the etaPERF™ motor run near-inaudible.

SupraTorque™

Most fans become slightly slower when working against back pressure such as on heatsinks and radiators, which results in reduced performance. Enabled by the new NE-FD6 driver IC, Noctua’s SupraTorque™ technology allows the fan to leverage additional torque headroom when required in order to keep its RPM speed at the desired level no matter the airflow resistance, ensuring consistent performance even in the most demanding conditions.

Sterrox® liquid-crystal polymer (LCP)

Sterrox® is a novel liquid-crystal polymer (LCP) type material that has much better dimensional stability and less creep as compared to conventional engineering thermoplastics such as ABS, PA, PBT or PC. The name Sterrox® is derived from the Greek word στερρός, which means stiff, firm, solid, hard or rugged.

Liquid crystal polymers possess remarkable chemical and mechanical properties, such as high tensile strength and environmental inertia, that make them ideal for high-end medical and military applications with demanding requirements and budgets that can support the high material cost (roughly four times as high as PBT). The most well-known LCP is Kevlar, which is being used in products such as bulletproof vests, combat helmets and other body armour due to its excellent strength-to-weight ratio.

The remarkable mechanical rigidity of LCP materials is due to their unique molecular structure: unlike conventional polymers, which have a chaotic molecular chain orientation both in solid form and in the melt phase, thermotrophic LCPs such as Sterrox® show an ordered, rod-like molecular alignment even in the melt phase and solidify into a highly oriented, extremely rigid chain structure, which gives them much more advanced mechanical properties.

Sterrox® is Noctua’s own customised type of fibre-glass reinforced LCP that has been specifically fine-tuned for use in next-generation fan designs such as the NF-A12x25. Its extreme tensile strength, exceptionally low thermal expansion coefficient, high environmental inertia and excellent dimensional stability have made it possible to reduce impeller creep phenomena to levels that were previously unthinkable with PBT- or PA-based impellers.

In addition to permitting fan designs with much lower tip clearances, Sterrox® provides a second key advantage in having an elasticity modulus and damping properties that are ideal for reducing resonance and vibration phenomena in advanced fan blade designs such as the NF-A12x25. In particular, the use of Sterrox® allows the suppression of a phenomenon called blade surface mode vibration: a fan impeller has a natural frequency and multiple resonant modes. When the fan is running, the turbulent air around the fan blades will transfer vibration energy into the blades and cause resonant vibrations.

These surface vibrations are so minute that they are not critical from a mechanical point of view (unlike e.g. vibrations due to imbalance), but they can cause serious acoustic problems. The reason for this is that when the fan is running, there is a pressure difference between the intake and the outlet side of the fan (lower pressure on the upside of the blades, higher pressure on the downside of the blades). From an aero-acoustic point of view, this situation is similar to a stereo speaker where there is higher pressure inside the chassis and lower pressure outside the chassis. In both cases, the pressure difference leads to an efficient acoustic coupling, so the surface vibration of either the blades of the fan or the membrane of the speaker is transferred to the air. While this acoustic effect is desirable in the case of the speaker, avoiding it is crucial for fine-tuning the sound signature of advanced fan blade designs and this is where the increased stiffness and improved dampening properties of the Sterrox® LCP material come in: when comparing the same fan blade design made from PBT and Sterrox® and measuring their surface vibrations with a contactless Doppler laser vibrometer, the Sterrox® impeller dampens the same vibration excitement much quicker.

In real-world usage, this means that less vibration from air turbulence is transferred to the fan blades and, consequently, fewer surface mode vibrations are transferred back to the air as noise, which significantly contributes to the NF-A12x25’s smooth acoustic profile.