Experimental Hydraulic Performance Investigation of Fan Enclosure and Competing Effects

Air cooling has been widely adopted in electronic cooling. The fan as the airflow driver is the critical component in the air-cooling approach. Therefore, a detailed understanding of fan performance is essential to cooling design. In this paper, fan performance is experimentally investigated in two sections: single-fan investigation and multi-fan investigation. The single fan investigation section tests fan performance for various fan packages, including with or without front and back finger guards, fan cards, etc. The multi-fan section investigates the competing effect of fans working together in parallel with various designed distances between fans. The flow rate reduction due to the enclosure installed could be more than 7% at a lower fan speed. Hex opening shape finger guard on the front would have around a 2% flow rate increase compared to the downstream location. The fan competing effect only exists at lower fan speed and could increase the flow rate to 4% when fan spacing increases to 20 mm. This detailed fan performance investigation could contribute to individual fan design optimization and the scenario with multiple fans running simultaneously.