Thermal engineers face ever more difficult challenges in today's electronic equipment. Constrained by increasing thermal densities and decreasing product dimensions, engineers are tasked to find new and different methods to convectively cool their systems. Conventional approaches involve increasing fan rotational speeds in order to achieve higher volumetric airflows, hence increasing cooling capacity. As a result, acoustic noise and power consumption have become more prevalent factors of consideration. This article presents a brief overview of these problems and several fan speed control schemes that serve to reduce or eliminate them.
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