Austrian cooling company Noctua is developing a PC fan that employs Active Noise Cancellation technology, which if the company’s claims hold true, would make for a nearly silent cooler.

Noctua has partnered with RotoSub to apply this technology to a P.C environment.

Active Noise Cancellation works by emitting a sound wave of the noise at the same amplitude with an inverted phase, thereby cancelling out the noise’s sound wave. This is called phase cancellation or destructive interference.

This process is used in noise cancelling headphones. This quality of the process depends on the price of the headphones; the more expensive the headphone the higher quality of the digital signal processer.

A number of armchair military-intelligence analyst bloggers purport that the stealth helicopters used to ferry U.S Special Forces into Pakistan to assassinate Usama Bin Laden also incorporated this technology.

“Noctua is widely recognised as a leader in quiet PC cooling, so they were the obvious candidate when we were looking for a partner to commercialise the technology we’ve invented”, said Lars Strömbäck, RotoSub CEO, in a statement. ”The performance and quality of their fans is one of the best in this industry and their new NF-F12 fan with its FocusedFlow system is ideal for integrating our ANC technology.”

Noctua has not yet set a firm price for the cooler, but it is expected it will cost significantly more than their usual $20-25 priced fans.

A release date has yet to be confirmed, but Noctua and RotoSub project that they will need until 2013 to perfect the technology to accommodate for faster fan speeds.

Below is a video of the fan in action at Noctua’s labs.