Reducing the Acoustic Surface Power of a Cooling Fan Using the Mesh Morpher Optimizer

Cooling fans have many applications in industrial and electronic fields that remove heat away from the system. The process of designing a new cooling fan with optimal performance and reduced acoustic sources can be fairly lengthy and expensive. The use of CFD with support of mesh morphing, along with the development of optimization techniques, can improve the acoustic’s performance of the fan model. This paper presents a new promising method which will support the design process of a new cooling fan with improved performance and less acoustic surface power generation. The CFD analysis is focused on reducing the acoustic surface power of a given cooling fan’s blade using the surface dipole acoustic power as the objective function, which leads to an optimized prototype design for a better performance. The Mesh Morpher Optimizer (MMO) in ANSYS Fluent is used in combination with a Simplex model of the broadband acoustic modeling. The broadband model assists to estimate the acoustic power of the surface dipole sources on the surface of the blade without the need for expensive unsteady simulations. The monopole and quadrupole acoustics sources are ignored due to the relatively low fan speed considered in this study. The numerical results obtained through the new method have shown a reduced dipole surface intensity to be 47.2% of the original value. It is believed that with additional work and further studies, the results may be improved by modifying the mesh and using different objective functions.