I made a HUBLESS PC fan and it’s so loud!

so one thing I've always wanted to try was to to fully 3D print a fan or at least a majority of the fan I wanted three print however I never really put much effort into it because let's let's let's be honest it's it's a bit it's a bit boring until I seen this image this is the tip magnetic driving fan or TMD and it was created by Yin Sun technology corporation in like the early 2000s now if you look at every PC fan currently on the market today they pretty much all share at least one thing in common and that is the drive motor is in the hub and that's uh that's boring not the TMD the TMD moved the drive motor and moved the motor out of the Hub into the four corners of the fan you can see the drive coils that are in the four corners of the fan frame and those act on 12 magnets that are stubbed into a ring around the impeller and I thought this was pretty neat but although I thought it was pretty neat this seems to be the only fan like this ever created the only example and we don't see them really today so I probably wasn't that good even more egregious is the fact that there is still a hub yeah it's it's smaller than like a regular fan of the time but it's still there so that's uh that's a bummer but this little fan led me down a rabbit hole of Googling until I came across this this is the rim driven Thruster and that's that's what I'm talking about that's that's a fan no Hub and yes this isn't a PC fan it's a it's a Thruster for a boat but the design is what I decided that I wanted to try to go for I want to take the rim driven Thruster and the TDM and combine them together into like a real hubless PC fan with aspects like of both now the first thing I decided to do was the mechanical design I figured I figured at least for me that would be the easiest part and then I could worry about the electronic witchcraft I had to use to make it spin later I wanted to get a design down something that I thought looked cool and would work and then the electricity could be a problem for future James so this is what I came up with let's start with the fan frame I wanted this to be the size of a common 120 milliliter fan so 120 millimeters by 120 millimeters was the footprint I had to work with thickness wise where I ended up was 32 millimeters which is two millimeters more than something like the phantek's T30 so we're kind of right in there we're in the ballpark for what like a standard 120 millimeter fan is yes this one's 25 millimeters but the T30 that's 30 and we're close the next thing I decided to tackle were the drive coils at this point I really didn't know how I was going to make them spin but I I knew that I wanted to go with a three-phase brushless DC in-runner motor and after a bit of research I learned that the best thing to use for the coil cores was iron and since I again wanted this to be mostly 3D printed I decided to use iron filled PLA and since I was going for a three phase I knew that I had to go with something divisible by three so I ended up with 18 coils now I didn't land on 18 for any specific reason this is kind of what I decided the cores would look like they would interface with the fan frame and sort of like a dovetail type Groove and I was hoping that once I had them installed I would have enough space to do the hand winding of each coil in the frame itself now I will mention that during this process I received one of the bamboo lab x1cs the X1 Carbon Combos and this printer is absolutely phenomenal I like you have seen this printer on every single channel uh on the planet I never really thought much to it I thought just hey they're just doing doing real good marketing on this thing but then I got one and I used it and I'm I was actually pretty much Blown Away it printed out every single part for this build and everything that I've just been messing around with since flawlessly better than any printer that I've ever used and you know the tolerancing is just perfect the thing's so good that I actually talked my work into getting one so we could use it on projects anyway now that I have my drive Motors somewhat sorted at least I had them designed in a way that I thought they would work I I figured I would move to what I thought initially would be the hardest part of this build the bearings now finding something off the shelf really didn't seem like a viable option for this like you can find pretty large roller bearings but they're pretty expensive and for something like this I didn't really want to spend 500 on a bearing and then have to make the fan frame fit the bearing I did mess around with thrust bearings I thought that might be a good way to go but in the end I decided I would incorporate a normal roller type bearing into the fan itself around the top of the fan frame I added a Raceway large enough to fit a four millimeter ceramic ball bearing and I went with ceramic because I figured that it was lighter which was good and also it would be non-magnetic so I would have less issue trying to load the bearing with without the ball bearing trying to stick to every single magnet in sight I also added that same raceway on the top of the fan disc around the edge I left just enough space with them assembled that I hoped that it would hold the fan in place without very much slop but still being loose enough to allow it to spin freely however keeping the ball bearings evenly spaced meant that I was going to need to add a cage now this was I thought this was going to be really tough I didn't really know how I was going to print something so delicate and finicky I thought maybe resin printing but again the x1c absolutely nailed it kind of blew me away with how well it was able to print this little tiny cage without any warping or any stringing or anything it was it was fascinating loading the ball bearing was it wasn't hard it was it was a bit finicky as well um I wanted the front of the fan to be smooth so I wanted the front smooth side of the cage to face outwards which meant that I had to load the bearings from the back side which was a bummer because the backside was closed out by the coil so after I had them wrapped in a way that I thought would work I had to e gently remove the whole coil assembly from the frame and then on each Raceway I left a tiny little cutout that when a line was just larger than a four millimeter ball bearing and if I had those two aligned and had the cage underneath it I could press fit each ball bearing into the Raceway and this worked really really well the fan disc itself was going to hold the permanent magnets and I went with some small need magnets that I had found online and I pushed them into a slot that I created for them and then just held them in place with a little bit of glue and as I added them around the circumference of the fan I just alternated North Pole South Pole north pole South all the way around and if you're going to make this fan yourself I would recommend loading the the magnets into the fan disk before you assemble the bearing it would just be it's just easier to get to at the this point I pretty much had what I thought was a bladeless fan ready to go I ended up using 24 permanent magnets and winding the coils in a three-phase configuration with 15 turns on each coil I left the start of the a b and c exposed and that's kind of just where I was going to plug in the fan uh the A6 B6 and C6 I just cut them off short scraped off some of the enamel and then soldered them all together covered them and tucked them away oh the last thing I did was add a back plate to the back of the fan I did this just kind of clean everything up a little bit also this was going to help hold the coils in place so they didn't try to work them work themselves out as this thing probably vibrated its life away and I held these in place with 18 M3 by 12 Flathead screws and in the end this is what I was left with [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Applause] now so far I'm actually pretty happy with this thing it does spin it does look like a fan it's although a bit thicker but it is obviously missing the Hub which I think looks really cool I don't like I think we should Tamp down our expectations I don't expect this thing to one to be very quiet I mean listen to those bearings run around there just by spinning it by hand um the normal fans use fluid Dynamic bearings that are silent however given this situation that wasn't going to be something I could do also I really didn't spend much time thinking about the fan blade geometry I just kind of made something that looked kind of like the thrusters I've seen and that was it so maybe not optimized I don't know how fast it's going to spin if it if it does Spin and you know I guess we'll find I'll put a tag on it so we can measure the RPM I haven't hooked up to this small little control board that I found online I'll have all this information in the description if this is something you want to try to build we're going to go with uh try to start it with 12 volts and see if I got it correct enough to work oh okay that it hesitated for a minute I thought it might not go but it started out pretty pretty easily oh [Music] it is really loud I better get some safety glasses just in case let's see if we can just see how loud it is that I don't know about like 10 inches away [Music] oh God I went the wrong way it held together I mean it was like 91 decibels of what 10 inches or so maybe 30 40 speed and then I turned it the wrong way to turn it off and it cranked up didn't break we got her shut off let's see uh where's my RPM thing so normal noctua is about 2 000 RPM so we'll see I'm just gonna get it going and we're gonna measure it faster [Music] oh boy I'm going down so we're getting standard you know desktop fan speeds out of this thing at maybe half speed we got a little way to go but before we send it I better see if it's even moving in here [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you okay that worked way better than I thought it's holding together pretty good so I think we are going to turn it all the way up where's the off there's off all the way up I'm gonna hit the power and we're gonna see how high it gets before it breaks or maybe we'll get lucky and it'll it'll hold together we're about to find out this is like as far exceeded my expectations we got up to about 2 800 2900 RPM and I mean it's still Rock Solid it's there's no no play I mean it's the loudest it's loud as all all hell but it's holding together pretty good I guess we'll see how much air it's actually moving so I have this set up kind of like season four where it's simply just airflow through this wind tunnel uh we'll run it full speed see how it does compared to the other fans we know about and get an idea how well it's performing even though I lose a little hearing every time it goes off [Music] I don't think my power supply can keep up with it I don't I don't know it doesn't feel like anything's getting hot I just don't think I have a beefy enough one but we got about 386. I'll go dig up the uh season four scoreboard and we can see how that kind of fits into what everything else did that season on this kind of same setup but wow yeah really impressed here well to tell you I'm surprised is an understatement this this thing held up incredibly well it just kind of Tanked all that damage I mean it's not even the bearing has no slop in it I mean if anything it spins better it kind of wore itself in a little bit but there's no slop the the wires didn't heat up on the windings I'm surprised to be honest I thought when we would crank up the speed that it would what I really thought was going to happen was that one the bearings were gonna start overheating in the channel because it's just PLA and it was going to warp and let go or I was gonna fry one of the windings and the magical blue smoke was going to come out and they'd all be all done but that's not the case um this thing didn't even get warm none of the wires got warm nothing is loosened up I mean we could maybe push it even farther I think this thing's rated up to like 35 volts and then like 35 amps I don't even have a power supply with that that uh that beefy but I think if I maybe dug out an old PC power supply would be able to get more better 12 volt amperage but I don't know let me know what you want to do with this fan next if you want to see anything else with it because it's still here and I don't know if we can kill it I mean we can kill it I can pretty much break anything but I'm almost kind of attached to it because it looks so cool even though I have tinnitus in my ears now because it's the loudest thing what a lot of things I've actually ever created on this channel but it works so much better than I ever thought it could and if you want to make one of these for whatever reason um you don't like hearing things or what not I believe all the uh all the models I'll download onto my or upload onto my thingiverse so you can pull them down download them build this thing modify it do whatever you want I'll leave a full bill of materials in the description below with links to where I purchased everything in the quantities that I used so you can uh you can make one if you want me to do anything else with this thing let me know in the comments down below I would be interested to know if you're more electrically inclined than I am what did I do that was a bit Overkill underkill not 100 correct because uh I'm flying by the Sea of my pants on most of this stuff but I like it till next time

Channel: Major Hardware

Views: 311,787

Keywords: hubless fan, tmd fan, hub less fan, 3d printed fan, loud fan, fully 3d printed fan, hub driven fan, hub drive, hub driven thruster, hub driven PC fan, pc fan with no hub, hubless pc fan, fan, pc, gaming, gaming pc fan, fan showdown, major hardware, major hardware fan showdown, i built a hubless pc fan, i 3d printed a hubless fan, bambu lab x1-c, x1-c, x1, p1p, bambu lab, best 3d printer, creating a hubless fan, hubless, hub less, 3d printed brushless motor, DIY dc motor, motor

Id: _ZMpAbgLyJk

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/bSun0000]

Pretty much useless device apart from its looks. Fan blades in the central region contributes the least amount to the air flow - it basically does not work in the middle, at all. It makes no sense to not use this area for the motor - too much downsides from "flipping it inside out": Hard to make a proper closed-loop magnetic system - loss in the performance and efficiency, very complicated bearing system (you need something like a magnetic suspension bearings), noise and friction, reliability.. additional weight on the edges makes everything much worse cuz of the centrifugal forces, balancing this thing is a hell on its own.

http://www.dansdata.com/tmdfan.htm

Y.S. Tech TMD fan

Review date: 7 May 2002.

Dead since 2002. Even if they used a bearing in the middle instead of a "true" hubless design it is still bad.

[u/Source-Elegant]

A swiss company designed an underwater ROV, using this kind of thrusters, so they can avoid any damage from seaweed, rope pieces etc.