How a proper use of fan curve and fan sizing in ventilation system can reduce carbon footprint !
Sizing a centrifugal fan involves determining the airflow, pressure, and power requirements for a specific application. This process ensures the fan operates efficiently and meets the needs of the system it serves. However due to the culture of guestimation and failing to use capture velocity at the accurate capture plane, a ventilation system in the industries name it LEV System, GV System or even AHU will end up getting oversized. Don’t forget there is another form of false believe which is, the higher the velocity the better the efficiency will be.
In Malaysia, these flawed baseless engineering practice has been going on for ages till today. Legislative stipulation such as Use and Standard of Exposure of Chemical Hazardous to Health) 2000 and Clean Air Regulation 1978/ 2014 are struggling to curb this habit. The failure of all the stake holders involved working together for a common objective in building a successful control system is the major cause of this halt. The tunnel vision of just needing to comply to the EHS team of an industry propels to the formation and existences of substandard report findings. We have successful created a fantasy world of compliance rather than forming a mechanism to improve and run a reliable high efficacy control system.
At this new dawn of racing toward optimising carbon foot print and creating high rated ESG Reports, are the fact of poor engineering design practice gonna get swept under the carpet to form a ‘nice’ and desirable on the papers reports.
Now let’s looks at the technical fundamentals and how we can make about the change. Let’s focus on a typical act of sizing a ventilation system fan.
Running a ventilation fan at lower amps can help reduce the carbon footprint, but it depends on how the flow rate and system static pressure was derived in the first place. Operating a fan at lower amps typically means the system is consuming less power. If the fan motor is powered by electricity from the grid, reducing power consumption can lead to a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions associated with electricity generation, especially if the grid relies on fossil fuels.
As now we know correcting the current flawed engineering practice can kill two birds in one stone ; high reliable system for safety and thermal comfort while reducing carbon foot print. Let’s look at these steps which can bring about the change :-
We need to ensure competent designer are engaged in this process .
RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) team matrix must be adopted to ensure the is a synergy among all the stake holders ranging from owner, process engineer, maintenance engineer, HSE personal and etc are working together in forming the blueprint. RACI Team Matrix is a tool used in project management and team collaboration to define and clarify the roles and responsibilities of team members. It is a simple and effective method for assigning tasks, making sure everyone understands their part in a project, and ensuring that work is completed efficiently.
Measures such as DOE notification and USECHH REG 18 needing a design using acceptable standards must be practise not merely for its legal compliance but for its actual means of engineering practices.
Upon installation, the commissioning process must run for few weeks doing dry runs, wet runs in every form of scenarios.
Hand over process must incorporate full fledge training with topics ranging from change of management, proper operation, effective preventive maintenance, troubleshooting and etc.
Baseline reporting upon successful completion of commissioning process with setting made on actual production runs.
Run other associate monitoring such as exposure monitoring, noise risk assessment, emission monitoring, GHG emission reporting, ambient air monitoring, area concentration monitoring to evaluate LEV capture efficiency, fan speed, fan amps, brake horsepower and etc.
Assess the effectiveness of the preventive maintenance protocol.
Continual efforts to maintain the operation within the baseline peak performance to ensure motor amps drawback is always with lower end.
The continuous improvement can only get triggered if there is gonna be a collective efforts from a spectrum of stake holders involved ranging from HSE personal, system provider, IH Engineer, Reliability Engineer, Local department, Plant owner and many others. Let’s start small . With good intention it will snowball to a bigger change.
