Custom Chromatography Cooling Fan Brackets

Fixing $1M OEM crappy design with a little flair… Who mounts a fanless industrial PC upside down in a pendant enclosure? And how do you fix it without triggering re-validation?

We laser-cut custom brackets in-house, mounted a couple of case fans, and made the inside of this GMP equipment fabulous!

The true goal was heat remediation. These off-the-shelf fans have temperature sensors and PID fan speed controller built into these Corsair units.

The OEM equipment shipped with a PC mounted upside down at the top of a pendant enclosure. The enclosure had a filter fan and vent, but they were mounted on the door. This caused a small heat eddy to form at the top of the panel.

The temperature sensor let us monitor the heat before and after spinning up the local fan. It worked pretty well, lowering the temperature and hopefully extending the life and stability of the PC.

But why the colored LEDs inside?

As a GMP system, all software and configurations are kept under change control—LED configuration included.

And so, it had to stay in the default setting. Which just so happened to be in disco-rainbow mode pictured.

I won’t lie, I kinda dig being one of the few people who knows there’s a party going on inside the equipment when we walk by.

There are probably better solutions to achieve the same goal, but this is one fun project to implement that had style and function.