Comparing Different Flow Control Devices for Mechanical Draft Fans Mechanical draft fans are integral parts of a plant’s operations. They are essential to moving large amounts of air and gases through a system duct and components, but they use a large amount of power and can result in serious... Read More
In 2011, ReEnergy Holdings LLC acquired the Black River Generation facility at Fort Drum, the home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division near Watertown, NY. The Albany-based company had plans to convert the decommissioned coal-burning power plant into a biomass-fed powergeneration facility that would supply the military installation and surrounding... Read More
Industrial fans are crucial to the efficient performance of plants of all sizes, from power plants to steel mills and pulp & paper mills. The importance of their job – to direct the flow of air and gases – cannot be overstated. A well-designed, well-maintained mechanical draft fan system will... Read More
Every plant manager wants their plant to function at the highest level of productivity possible while complying with emissions regulations. This article documents common problems that reduce biomass systems’ efficiency and offers straightforward ideas for solving them. Topics covered include biomass fuel delivery, boiler air systems, and mechanical dust collectors.... Read More
Mechanical draft fans are some of the largest parasitic loads in any production process. More often than not, existing fans are improperly engineered for peak efficiency due to the designer’s fear of creating a system limited by fan draft. Cost-effective modifications to these fans can significantly increase performance and reduce... Read More
Efficiency is an important topic in mechanical draft fan engineering, as well as process engineering more broadly. Currently, there are many different types of fan efficiency ratings prevalent in discussions of draft fan engineering, but these ratings are rarely compared side by side and assessed to see if they are... Read More
ProcessBarron was contracted to retrofit two aging fans at the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association’s Escalante Generating Station in Prewitt, New Mexico, with more efficient designs, rather than an in-kind swap out. The existing fans needed to be replaced because of age, and in-place tests showed that the “A” fan... Read More
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are an effective way to assess the viability of a fan installation. A form of computer simulation, CFD is much less expensive than scale model testing and provides an opportunity to test design variations iteratively in a virtual environment so that one can arrive at a... Read More