Male:
Hi, good morning as well as good afternoon depending upon your location in the US. Welcome to Better Plants webinar. This is actually a preparation webinar for upcoming in-plant training, fan system in-plant training at Charter Steel Saukville, Wisconsin plant. This is Sachin Nimbalkar, Technical Account Manager for Better Plants Program and we have our expert, fan system expert, Warren Martin today with us. He's going to deliver a roughly 1-hour webinar and we also have Tari Emerson from Charter Steel. So what we'll do is we'll start with roughly 5-minute opening remarks from Tari Emerson and then we'll go for actual webinar from Warren Martin.
Just a couple of things for all participants, in the beginning of this webinar all participants, we are going to keep you in mute condition. Basically all your phones are muted just to keep background noise minimum but during the webinar if you have any questions or if you have any comments please actually use - there is actually a questions tool on the right-hand side in the GoToWebinar toolbox. There is actually a questions box as well as a chat box so you can actually write your question or send us a chat message. We'll address your questions as well as comments.
There is 1 more option. There is actually a digital hand. You can actually wave your digital hand using the GoToWebinar tool and then we'll un-mute you and then we'll ask you then - then ask you a question to the expert, Warren Martin. And then at the end of the webinar we'll un-mute all of you. With that I'm going to request Tari Emerson from Charter Steel, she is Corporate Energy Manager there, maybe introduce herself and then give us opening remarks, a little bit of background on Charter Steel's participation in Better Plants Program. Tari? Tari, are you there? I think - maybe I think what we should do then in that case I think Tari is probably on mute; her phone is probably muted. Tari, can you hear us?
Female:
Hi Sachin. Can you hear me now?
Male:
Yes, yes, yes, we hear you well. Yes, go ahead Tari. Well technical difficulties and I had actually reserved a room but then called in from my office so...
Male:
Okay, no problem. Okay, great.
Female:
I just wanted to welcome everybody to the pre-training class on our fan seminar. Hopefully everybody is excited to attend. This would be Charter Steel's third DOE-sponsored or facilitated event. We had a treasure hunt that we conducted in Cleveland, we had a process heating event that we had in _____, and now we're looking at the fan class with _____.
Charter Steel joined the Better Plants Program in the fall of 2015 and set a goal of 25-percent reduction in 10 years so our baseline is 2016 so our goal plan is to make that in 2026. You know we're looking forward to the fan training and looking for potential savings. We feel it's important to conduct an event every year to get fresh ideas to help us meet those reduction goals. I did want to welcome any guests that are not Charter - from Charter Steel. Certainly we've found that the guests have a unique viewpoint and are able to provide a fresh review so welcome to our guests.
We will be providing a safety video when you arrive here and personal protective equipment but we do request that you wear - if you have any steel-toed boots, if not for sure closed-toed shoes and long pants and if you have any specific eye protection bring that along; otherwise we will be able to provide that. In addition to the guests we're certainly excited to have a cross-functional team of people from Charter Steel being able to participate in this _____ so that we get a variety of views and opinions and hopefully that will give us the best results as far as finding savings. So with that I can turn it back over to Sachin.
Male:
Great, great. Thank you so much Tari. We have roughly 27 participants today and I'm glad actually we are kind of starting with Tari I think your introductory remarks are very important and background also are very helpful. Again we are going to keep all participants in mute because we want to keep background noise low. I think with that without wasting further time I'm going to request Warren to actually start with slide number 1. Warren, are you there?
Male:
I'm here. Can you hear me okay?
Male:
Yes, yes, we hear you very well. Yes, thank you Warren. Go ahead.
Male:
Well thank you very much Sachin. It's a pleasure to be participant in the webinar today and I can tell you that I'm very much looking forward to the event at Charter Steel. I had the pleasure of visiting the plant this past week and I'll tell you it was great to meet everybody there, a great group, great facility, and wonderful training room. I got a chance to take a walk through the plant and take a look at some of the fans that we're going to see what we can do about incorporating into the course so I'm very excited about the event.
So for this webinar that we have over the next hour I've got a few slides up front that I want to present talking in some very I guess you'd say an overview perspective of Better Plants and the program and then we're going to talk a little bit about our company and what we hope to provide to the attendees of the fan systems training at Charter Steel and then what also at the back part of this, and this is actually going to be more of the focus of the 1-hour talk here is going to be an overview of fans and fan systems and how one approaches this sort of equipment in order to try to optimize the energy use of it. So that's sort of roughly where - a bit of a thumbnail sketch of where I plan to go over the course of the next hour.
Okay, so let me see - there we go. The in-plant model, 5 major objectives, what this is and Tari enunciated this point about the goal, which is the 25-percent reduction in 10-year period, objectives for this beyond this beyond that are identifying the energy-saving opportunities and I mean it all has to start with identification, doesn't it? If you don't have that as something identified then you can't very well proceed further.
Some of the way you proceed involves networking, there's vendors that you have that you've got to work with in order to realize this, there's the project implementation, and when you take on any kind of a project there's a process that you have to follow right from the study to the writing of specifications, selecting the particular vendors, getting the thing commissioned properly, put into service, and then verifying that it all works properly, and then part of that process too is to leverage this and to make sure that you can do it over again whether or not that's in the same plant or in other plants that you may have. And then of course taking that forward into the real-world training to get a little freedom and other opportunities in other areas or training with the equipment that you've optimized to make sure that everybody is aware of what is required to keep it in an efficient running state.
What is in-plant? Several things that in-plant involves but focusing strictly on the training, typically this is going to be a multi-day event at a host plant, in this case Charter Steel. It's going to involve both classroom and fieldwork sessions; at least - I haven't visited anybody else's so I'm assuming that they also get in the field and I'm sure they do. I've seen some of the pictures at least of other events and you know that's quite important to get some real-world experience. I'll tell you, of all the different trainings I've participated in I think this is 1 of the greatest ones just simply because you get this mix of classroom and dirt under the fingernails experience in the field to actually either bring those examples into the training or to use those in order to figure out what you can do to optimize the equipment that you're dealing with so it really does work out pretty well.
In-plant spreads the benefit beyond the walls of the host facility and that's certainly the case whether or not you're dealing with other plants or whether you're dealing with your suppliers or somebody in that complete chain. And so all of this is designed to just keep the focus and a culture in place of treating energy efficiency as something that you can control and very important to do that from the perspective of the profitability of the company and achieving all of those goals of in this case here 25-percent reduction over 10 years.
Here are some pictures of a few other trainings. I've got to tell you, I love the DOE for selecting this photo because I think somehow we got featured in 3 of 6 photos that are in there. We got a couple of us from flow care doing fan testing at a previous in-plant on the top left corner there and then on the top right you can see the fan model and I'll talk a little bit about the fan model that we're going to bring to Charter Steel for the training. Then the middle picture at the bottom there that's actually 1 of the fans that we tested at _____ Middle as part of the in-plant training. That's a combustion air fan for a re-heat for us and found some pretty - yeah, some excellent savings on that fan as a result of the work that we did at the in-plant training.
Male:
Yes, yes, that's correct Warren and I think intentionally we added those photographs because you are actually there in an action and then a couple of other photographs in the middle we have compressed air in-plant training at Navistar plant. I think Jack _____ is also attending to this webinar and then Jack ______ is actually corporate energy manager for Navistar and heating the middle picture there, compressed air in-plant training.
Bottom left we have our leader, Tom _____ from R&L using a pure gas analyzers collecting pure gas data at an aluminum manufacturing plant and on the right-hand side we have an _____ ______ Center and actually in ______ they actually conducted a 2-day - basically a 2-day cross-cutting assessment along with compressed air in-plant training as a Navistar plant so we can do that also so cross-cutting that means they look at all systems. So there are different types of in-plant trainings available. Well today of course I want to focus on fan systems but just FYI the different types of in-plant trainings available, and in fact there was an email from DOE yesterday asking for applications, in-plant training applications from Better Plants companies to submit so that we actually go for the next round of in-plant training. Go ahead Warren, sorry.
Male:
No, that was great input and I'm focused on fans and obviously that's not the only game in town. There's a lot of other important things and other good trainings that are available as part of this. For those who are considering in-plant training it is a process that you go through in order to get this set up and it takes several months. At least if you don't have several months it does get way too rushed and you like to at least have some organizing up ahead there to work through a lot of the logistics of exactly what you all want to be focused on and include and how you're going to do it.
And but it doesn't end either with the training. We go through the preparations, the pre-training, which is this webinar, the field training, which will happen in a few weeks at Charter Steel, and then there's follow-up with this where the correspondence between the host and participating plants and I want to make it clear that at any point anybody is welcomed to give me a call to follow up anything that comes up later on. A lot of times things come up later and they're kind of like, "Yeah, you know what? I think he talked about that." Well feel free to shoot me off an email or call me up and we can work through something.
Qualification for fan workshop attendees, I was telling Sachin that this is 1 slide that I changed a little bit. There was a few different bullets on the original slide here that had to do with trying to define specific people who would be the best to take the in-plant training and there was nothing wrong with that list. It involved talking about energy managers and people involved with production and controls people and so forth, definitely all the right people here.
But when I think about the people who have benefited most from the training that we've done quite often they're people that you just simply would not expect. It doesn't have to be necessarily people with - in manager's positions, more education, or that sort of thing because the point that I want to make with this is that with fans in particular it's the simple things that get done that can really, really send your energy bills through the stratosphere.
I'll give you an example with this. A few years ago we were doing some work on a power plant and there were 2 units at this power plant and each unit had 4 large fans. And each 1 of these fans had a low speed and a high speed and at 1 point they used to be able to make full boiler load on low speed. And then all of a sudden they found out that they couldn't make boiler load speed anymore on 1 unit, just 1 of the units, and so they had to go to high speed. Well the different between low and high speed meant that 4 fans were taking 2000 horsepower more, so a total of 8000 horsepower more in order to make boiler load.
And after running this way for a while and not getting to the bottom of it somehow they became aware of us and our company and asked me to come down to look at it and I kept telling them, I said, "You know I really do believe we've got to get inside the fan here to see what's going on with this and what changes did you all make on this," and so forth and I guess I was at a conference someplace and I got a call at 10:00 at night saying, "We've had an unexpected outage. Can you get up here?" and by pulling a few tricks I managed to get up to site and they had the doors open. I poked my head inside and what I found was that they had installed a wash system to wash the particles, wash the debris that built up on the fan impeller and the way the plumbing was set up on 1 fan the plumbers had kind of tucked up the piping right next to the wall of the fan on the inside and it didn't get into the path of the airflow whereas on the other one they had built a little tray that stuck out about 6 inches and the air had to come down and it hit this tray and as it would kind of swirl around the tray it would get into the eye of the impeller, but it did so in such a way that it ruined the performance of the fan and so they had to switch all these fans now to high speed.
So a bit of a long anecdote there to say it's the simple things. I mean in this case it was a plumber who just didn't know better who ended up creating a situation where the power went up by 8000 horsepower on these fans. You know tuck that plumbing up against the wall and you won't have a problem. So I mean here's the kinds of things that I look for as far as qualifications because you have people in the plant that are operating fans but they really don't know what causes what and in particular what the relationship is between what's going on with the fans and what's going on with the production. And in a steel plant, which is where we're going to of course, you have these different operating modes of charge and tap and blow and it's very important to know exactly what should that fan be doing for each one of these modes.
The second thing, and this is sort of the issue that becomes something I deal with so often is maintenance issues on fans, I understand that in our company we're dealing with a lot of different problems, not just excess energy. And I had this theory that if somebody is telling me they've got a fan that's a chronic nightmare as far as maintenance goes it's also oozing energy. And you don't have to look too far with examples in your day-to-day life to know how that happens. I mean if you've got a sputtering car, you know what, it also isn't going to be energy efficient. If you've got underinflated tires it isn't going to be very energy efficient.
I often use that as a test to see whether or not there's going to be energy in addition to what kind of problems that are the immediate things that need solving. Are you designing a new process for which fans are going to be selected? We're going to talk about selecting new fans to some extent during the fan in-plant training and it's so important to get it right the first time because if you don't get it right the first time it seems like you're struggling with this thing that you spent a lot of money on and it just isn't quite what you need for the application.
Are you process-limited, poor control, you can't make certain products because of not being able to get the flow down to where you should have it? One of the other areas of course especially in a steel plant you're dealing with fume capture and it's so important because it's usually the fume capture fans that are all your largest fans. And then the final point is that we want to be competitive with where the plant should be and the energy costs are 1 of those controllable costs or somewhat controllable costs that you'd like to get reduced as low as possible. So those are the qualifications that I put for the attendees with that notion that sometimes it's the very simplest things that can throw your energy costs way sky high.
Sachin, I don't know. Rewards for participation? I know 1 thing: I'll probably bring some prizes along, but I don't think that's what the DOE intended on this slide so Sachin if you want to jump in on that one you're welcomed to do so.
Male:
So yeah, I think unfortunately we won't be able to have actually gifts from DOE's end but I think Warren, we definitely - from your end or maybe Tari from your end anything possible there is good.
Male:
Okay, well the reward here is we're going to learn some pretty cool stuff and we're going to have a lot of fun with this. I'll tell you 1 thing: I do these quite often just because they're so much fun to do and so I guarantee you that the reward here is definitely going to be we're going to have a great time at Charter Steel.
Okay, so this is me. I am a steel plant in this picture. I work for a company called FLOWCARE Engineering and in a nutshell the way I describe ourselves maybe actually it comes up on the next slide here, we provide independent expertise in fans. Mostly I work out of Cambridge, Ontario. This was home to quite a few different fan manufacturers over the years and I like to think of us and this is the way I describe ourselves in the shortest words is that we're a fan company that doesn't build fans because most of our people are engineers that worked previously for fan companies.
So we help customers make what I call smart fan decisions. We got into business in the early '90s doing energy work with utilities that wanted to reduce energy costs and had demand-side management programs. We've actually worked with the Department of Energy going back to a program they had years ago in the '90s called Motor Challenge. Here is a listing of some of the things we do. We do troubleshooting on fans. I tell people there's only 5 problems with fans. You either shake too much, they're too noisy, you can't get enough capacity out of them, you can't control them, or mechanically they won't hang together and so we've got expertise in all of those areas from our background of having worked for fan manufacturers.
We do fan mechanical designs, some of that for fan companies. We do overload engineering for quite a few different fan companies actually. Computational fluid dynamics, for those who don't know what that is it's all about flow modeling and working through the issues involving flow distribution and pressure drops on ductwork or other hardware in order to solve problems or reduce energy. Actually it's got a big energy reduction component to it because as you'll find out here very quickly if you can reduce your pressure drop you can reduce your energy costs.
Project management, we're a little selective eon that. What I mean by project management is that if we do a study on equipment then after the project is done if there's some merit in proceeding then customers will often contact us and ask us to write specifications for it, help them do the bid review, source inspections of equipment, we may be able to help during commissioning doing the validation testing after the fact, and so forth.
I'll show you the next slide here, which is the energy studies. As I mentioned we got into this in the '90s when utilities had a number of demand-side management programs and of course a lot of them still do, but energy studies kind of runs that gamut from coming in and doing the preliminary to something a little more beefier than that, which is your audit right through to detailed studies and then taking that on through to a measurement and verification program. What you're looking at in that picture is just a few weeks old. I was in Mexico at a steel plant there back I guess actually in January so a few more than a few weeks there. We were doing some performance testing on a large fan.
So here's our overall agenda and I apologize that this isn't really laid out in really specific terms here. It is kind of left general and that's for a variety of reasons. There are some fixed things that we know that we can do. The first point there is really for the benefit of Charter Steel. We will plan to - I'll be traveling on the weekend. I will be bringing somebody with me because when you present with a model you actually need a second person who can help to run the thing, but we'll be traveling on the weekend, plan to arrive on Monday morning, get moved into the training room, and then we'll be in the plant. I'd like to do a test on what - my focus right now and this could change, but I think the focus is I'd like to do a test on 1 of the baghouse fans and then we'll work through the results of that and try and get that worked into the course. So I will need a little bit of assistance from Charter Steel on that and we'll go through some of that offline here.
So Tuesday and Wednesday are day 1 and day 2 of the training and I believe the plan is to be there at 7:30 and the first half hour will be coffee, continental breakfast, networking, and then 8:00 there'll be some introductory remarks by Tari and Sachin. I don't think you're going to be there Sachin; I'm not sure. Is that - I know Christine is going to be there, correct?
Male:
That's correct. Christine Armstrong, she's also a mechanical engineer at Oak Ridge National Lab, technical account manager for a few companies, and so she's actually working with you on fan system assessment tools, our _____ software tool, it's in actually development phase so she will join, yes. She will join at the _____ project, yes.
Female: Hi everyone.
Male:
Good morning Christine. We'll look forward to meeting you there actually after having chatting with you on the phone a few times. 8:30 to 5:00 we're going to be doing training and on both days - well maybe the second day will start a bit earlier than that. And I kind of put this note on the bottom of this here, which is that day 2 I'm thinking that we should have a little bit of discussion about that. There's always travel schedules that seem to get into play in these things and if we end up over in the plant there could be issues involving plant activities or I suppose rain and things like that so we'll leave that a little bit flexible. Twenty-minute coffee breaks morning and afternoon though are guaranteed along with a 1-hour lunch from 12:00 to 1:00 and I can be certainly more definitive with this as we get closer.
Here are the training concepts though that we will be having here that we will use a model for to demonstrate as well as the regular slide presentations and I always like to include exercises into the material. They usually are exercises that you need to do yourself or in a group and quite often need a calculator for so please bring calculators. And I try and do those exercises over the course of about 5 or 10 minutes. I always figure that it's 1 of those things if you see something on a slide and you can quickly use that material in order to come up with solving even a basic problem there's something about that that just sticks better in your head after you walk out of the place.
So we're going to talk about fan terminology, fluid basics; fans of course move air and air is a gas that has got certain properties and you kind of have to have a little bit of a basic understanding about fluids generally in order to understand what happens with fans and fan performance. We're going to demonstrate fan performance curves with a model and talk about how they're developed, what they're used for, the system curves that are associated with them. Fan model is also used for demonstrating fan laws. For those of you who don't know what fan laws are in a nutshell it has to do with being able to predict a performance for an unknown situation based on a known situation so meaning a different size of fan, a different speed of fan, a different density of gas, and there are a few other things as well.
Not all fans are connected to systems that behave the same way. There's actually different system types so we're going to cover that under system basics. Not all fans are controlled the same way so we're all familiar with dampers and variable speed and we'll talk a little bit about both of those. Cost of fan ownership, which can extend well beyond just the energy and the purchase of the fan for example, we'll talk about that. There are many, many ways that you can save energy with fans. People quite often get stuck very quickly on jumping on variable speed but there are actually many, many other ways as well and I want to cover off as many of those as we possibly can and then the next point here that relates to that is the application issues involved with those techniques because not all of them are applicable in every case. Some of these are ones that you can get yourself into a lot of trouble with even though they do save you a bunch of energy.
So there's something called system effects and if you go back to that 1 picture that had me with the model it showed me holding up an elbow there. Well system effects have to do with fan inlet and outlet conditions and what you can do with your ductwork to streamline it in such a way that you can actually improve the performance of your fans. It's a very important issue and fan model is actually quite useful for demonstrating that.
I'm going to talk about purchasing new fans. There is 1 particular issue there that has to do with something called performance tolerances that I think you want to walk away from this fully understanding if you happen to be at that position where you might be buying new equipment. Fan maintenance problems, I'm particularly of course going to be focusing on those problems that relate to energy or can be good indicators that your system isn't working quite right from an energy perspective. And then the last point here as I mentioned on the Monday I'd like to do a test on a fan and I want to incorporate some of that into our course material here so that's sort of what that last bullet point is all about. And I won't know exactly how much time I need to deal with that until I get a little more information for which I'm working with - I'll be having discussions with the Charter Steel people about that.
I mentioned our model several times here. I don't think I'm going to bring all the components that are on here. I usually use though about 2/3 of those parts in a workshop like this and it's just so useful to be able to demonstrate certain things. I remember a few years ago I did a workshop and a lady came up to me afterwards and she said, "I've been struggling to know how a fan performance curve was developed for so long and it just made it so clear over the course of about 20 seconds how that curve was developed." When you see it happening before your eyes it is well instrumented in such a way that it actually shows on the screen in real-time what's going on with the system. So anyway, we'll get that to site and get it set up and that's what we'll be using and attendees will certainly be - I'll be leaning on attendees for certain parts here to help me out on different things, okay?
Okay, so the last part of this webinar is going to talk a little bit about fan systems in particular and about what you can do to save energy with them. And I've put this sub-title on this about implementing a system methodology here and I think those who get involved with fans very quickly realize that you just don't look at 1 thing here. And in that sense it's really not too much different than anything else. I mean if you were to try to figure out how to reduce how much gas your car is using you don't just immediately jump on the idea of improving the efficiency of the engine do you? It has to do a lot with how the driver drives the car, how the driver maintains the car, whether the driver uses an efficient trip planning sort of method when they go out doing shopping or go to the office or whatever, whether or not they've got 2 people or 4 people in the car and so forth so there's a whole lot of things that have to do with improving the energy efficiency with a fan system and so I'll be touching on a few of those.
So I'm going to talk a little bit here now about fan and system basics, energy reduction, concepts from a very high level, what approaches, the process of doing energy optimization, and then there are a few specific items here, retrofits, variable frequency drives, performance guarantees, which is 1 of those things that I kind of alluded to earlier here when I was talking about what's involved with new fan purchases. I've also touched on system effects here and I want to kind of talk a little bit about that. It says case studies on the bottom there but actually I don't think I'll have time for any of those.
Basic fan definition, fan engineers use a book that's sort of the fan bible. It's called Fan Engineering and it was put out by the Buffalo Forge Company, which was a really big fan company based in Buffalo, New York now bought by the Howden Company and it's a book that has just an incredible a amount of detail in it. There's this definition of a fan in there that says that any device that produces a current of air by the movement of a broad surface can be called a fan. I think that actually is not 1 of their higher points of expertise in this book though even though it has a lot of great information. A broad surface, I think that piece of equipment on the right definitely is a fan and that would be called a reciprocating fan. A broad surface though, a plunger on a bicycle pump actually I think is a broad surface, but that's not a fan; that's really a positive displacement device.
And so a more complete definition of what a fan is that it is a device that once you've powered it up it will move a gas with a volume flow rate dependent on the resistance met by the flow. If you put your thumb over the end of a bicycle pump hose you're not going to decrease the flow; you're just going to increase the pressure in the line whereas with a fan as you start to put more and more resistance on the fan you actually will reduce flow. You can reduce it right back to nothing, zero flow, if you intended to do so. So that's really what a fan is. It's got that variability in it of that relationship between flow and pressure.
So a few classifications of fans, I think these are really not just the 3 main ones; they're just about the only ones really when you get down to it, certainly for the industrial world. And you can see on the left we have a centrifugal fan, air comes in the eye of the wheel here and then it's discharged, sort of it goes through a 90-degree turn, and then on the far right of that is the actual fan where flow comes in and flow leaves and in between these 2 you have something called a mixed flow fan, which is really kind of a hybrid between a centrifugal and axial where the flow kind of comes in and then it bends and continues on through.
Mixed flow are fans that you don't often see in the steel industry and I used to figure that the only ones I ever saw out there were 50 horsepower or maybe 100 horsepower in size and I was doing a talk 1 time at a mine ventilation symposium and 1 of the guys says, "Well we actually just sold some down to a mine in South Africa that are 4000 horsepower." I go, "Man, somebody's really, really gone with some big mixed flow fans there."
You can kind of see the different components on the fan, the inlet and the shroud of the impeller, the blades of the impeller, the back plate and the drive mechanism over here with a motor and then you can see the discharge of the fan and the same on the other one over here for the actual fan. Air comes in, air goes out, comes to the aluminum blades where they're given lift and then they go across; in this case the motor is built right into the fan and that's sort of the difference. I mean a simple definition here is that centrifugal fans centrifuge the air and it goes through that 90-degree bend whereas actual fans just pass it on through.
Fans of course are very important everywhere because of what they all do for commercial buildings, institutional buildings, and then industry in general. Forty percent of industrial electrical energy is related to - 40 percent of energy, electrical energy, is industrial and 70 percent of those are driving motors and then of those about 20 percent are driving fans and I don't think steel plants are all that much different. That's obviously a very broad statistic. I don't think steel plants are that much different. I guess it would depend if it's an integrated plant or an electrical or a mini-mill, but still the fans are of big importance. What you're looking at there is a mine ventilation supply fan in case you're wondering, axial fans.
And I often tell people that when they're looking at a facility and they want to kind of get an idea of where to start I always start with the biggest equipment and you very quickly start looking down that list of all the fans and how much energy they take and you think, "Well you know what? There's a whole lot of these small fans there but actually that 1 big fan takes more energy than all of those ones together," and this slide sort of demonstrates that. Essentially fans that are 1000 horsepower and bigger take 15 percent of your energy. It's as simple as that but even by the time you get over to this point here 10 percent of your motor population takes around 80 percent of your electrical energy. There's an awful lot of very, very small motors and you can see that curve rapidly rising but you don't add so much to the energy.
So I always start with the bigger equipment because I figure that's where the biggest kits are and there's actually a few reasons why that is the case and 1 of the reasons is that if you've got big equipment then chances are that somebody has looked at that at the design stage and said, "You know what? We want to make sure we've got enough. The last thing we want to do is spend this many million dollars on this new system and then find we're short." And if you've got big equipment that's running in throttle-back conditions then they become good candidates very quickly.
So fans have performance curves and in order to develop a fan performance curve you have to test the fans and you can do a performance test in the field as well just simply to know what you're fan is doing without even developing the whole curve here, but this happens to be a lab set-up. It doesn't quite look like a test lab but that's what it really is. The fans are big enough that they bolted them down on a pad outside; this is at a fan shop in Ohio.
And so here's our fan, it's connected with a discharge, and all these hoses right here, that's all part of a mechanism for measuring flow and then you can see this throttle device on the right side here and that throttle device of course is very important because as you close that throttle device in you're going to affect both the flow and the pressure. I'll show you that on our next slide here, which is what a fan curve is, which is that relationship between flow pressure and power and of course flow and pressure are the output of the fan, power is the input, and just about anything that I know about there that is output over input, those are what you need in order to establish efficiency.
When you're doing a fan curve you've got a fixed something and usually what you fix are the speed, the density, and the impeller diameter so when you look at a fan curve you almost always have that assumption that those things are fixed. The 1 caveat to that is that of course if you've got a variable speed fan they'll show multiple speeds, multiple performance speeds on the same curve.
But this is what you end up getting after you put your fan through its paces where that throttle point is fully closed and then you open it up and then you take it to the other extreme where it's wide open and not really building any pressure and the ductwork is just moving lots of flow. So for each 1 of those flow pressure points you find out what the power is and that becomes your flow power curve as well.
So we've now got our performance and we want to establish what our energy requirements are and from this perspective of where Charter Steel is having us do the in-plant training we're going to be talking about what the opportunities are to reduce energy. And it all really comes down to this 1 pretty basic formula here. I mean as shown on the previous slide here fan power is flow times pressure over fan efficiency or if you reverse that, you can flip these around here, but fan efficiency is flow times pressure over power. But this slide actually demonstrates all your opportunities of improving efficiency and to save energy because it all is going to come down to reducing the power on the fan. If you're going to reduce the power on the fan you've got a few choices. You can either reduce the flow, reduce the pressure, or improve fan efficiency, and that's it.
Every other technique, everything that you do to get to that point is a technique for this but those are the fundamentals of where you're actually going to be able to save your power. So in a steel plant if somebody comes along and says, "Well I think we're going to reduce our flow by 10 percent," you'll probably be laughed at so that doesn't work but at least most of the time unless somebody's got a system that's really oversupplied. As far as the pressure goes you might actually stand a much better shot because pressure relates to duct design and how the duct is connected into the equipment and other pressure losses throughout the system that you may be able to streamline and improve and then there's fan efficiency. Well fan efficiency relates to where the fan was selected for on its curve and how it's being controlled, whether or not it's damper controlled or speed controlled so there may be something you can do with that one as well.
So the first objective of course is always to reduce the flow in your systems, stop the oversupply, and then we improve the pressure losses to the most practical extent possible and then work with the issues of fan efficiency in that order by the way. And then once you've done that of course energy is power times time, reducing power involves these 3 items above, and the other important aspect is time where if you're going to be running the equipment at times when it doesn't need to run then maybe you've got something there that you can reduce as well.
So here's our areas of energy reduction. I view things both the flow and the pressure as being variables to some extent. There's some of that which will be productive use flow. Some of that may be non-productive. Same with the pressure, some of it would be variable, some would be fixed. Fan efficiency there's maybe some things you can do with that and then motor efficiency possibly but those are really all the areas right there that you're working with.
So I've kind of outlined this already as far as what the methodology is. The first step is to limit the flow to what you actually require. Don't oversupply if you don't need to. The second thing is to get your hardware as streamlined as possible so that your fan doesn't need to develop more pressure than it needs to. The third thing is to get your fan motor efficiency as maximized as is practical and then make sure that this is controlled in such a way that it meets these requirements across the range there without running when it doesn't need to or running at a higher operating point than it needs to for long periods of time.
When we get involved in doing a study 1 of the things that we're going to want to establish fairly quickly is something called the load duty cycle. So what is a load duty cycle? For me at least it manifests itself in the form of a table. I want to know what my operating points are and I kind of alluded to that in an email I had the other day with Charter, which is that for example on our baghouse fans I need to know what the modes of operation are, how much time does it spend in idle mode versus tap mode versus when it's blowing the vessel and so forth and then we can work on what our energy costs are, energy value is that's - or power value associated with that, the time it's at that point, and then that starts giving me my annual energy.
Usually I work with the instrumentation people in the controls room in order to get a load duty cycle chart established through the production information and that involves coming up with something like this where we figure out what the trend data is over the course of the day and then from that we work it through to sort that out into some sort of a load histogram. It's very important to have that kind of information in place in order to figure out what you're going to optimize. I mean if you've got low operating points and you've got high operating points but it turns out that the low operating points only happen for some short period of time then all of a sudden that may not start playing into much of an economic decision at that point so it's important to have that load histogram in place when you try to work your way through the study aspects of an optimization project.
So it looks at the whole picture here and I sort of raised this sort of spectrum before when I talked about what the areas are that you can save energy, which is to reduce flow, reduce pressure, or increase your equipment efficiency. And because of the way that equation is set up of flow times pressure over power each one of those has roughly the same amount of value. If you take a flow by 10 percent or reduce your pressure by 10 percent or improve your efficiency by 10 percent they all give you the same sort of impact in terms of reducing your power and your energy. But which is the easiest to achieve? And that's the fun part of this. Sometimes you can do a little bit of each, sometimes there's not much you can do with certain things. I will say this: it's usually a lot easier to play with the pressure than it is to play with the flow and for those of you who are involved with fume collection for example I'm sure you can relate to that comment.
So why do fans - what are the causes of poor fan efficiency and why do sometimes fans get found that just really aren't all that efficient? So the question comes into play was the fan efficiency overstated? That gets back into this purchasing new equipment and tolerance issues and that sort of thing. You might find that the fan - and this often happens, especially if you're dealing with fans that somebody has worked on after the case where there's no real good - there's no good pedigree of fan performance data concerning the actual equipment. It's been modified, it's been changed out, it's had a bunch of stuff done to it, and so the reality may be that what the fan efficiency is is somewhat of an unknown factor.
So was there a better choice of fan? Not all fans that are sold, even if they're brand new fans, have the same efficiency. A lot of this has to do with selection issues involving what design of impeller it has, what the specifics are of the diameter/speed relationships and so forth. The third point on here has to do with poor selection point and 1 of the unique things about fans is that you can take a very highly efficient fan and operate it at a totally inefficient operating point. So just having an efficient fan is no good; you have to make sure that it's the proper fan for the application and that it's actually operating at that efficient point. And then there's this issue of it potentially being degraded since installed, which I kind of alluded to.
So tolerances, when you - it's like anything. Performance is a measurement issue and when you do any kind of a measurement there's always going to be some uncertainty with the value. In this case AMCA, who I haven't defined yet, but AMCA is the Air Movement Control Association, it's the trade body for fan manufacturers and they have published years ago 1 of their documents called 203, which all has to do with fan performance measurements and when you get into the document you find that there's tolerances that are associated with each one of these parameters of flow, pressure, power. And when you kind of look at these things for a minute you go, "Okay, so if we have a really good test that would be a minimum level of uncertainty and a maximum - we could have an average and a maximum. You know when we get out here to the maximum those are some pretty big uncertainty values that are associated. What does that actually mean?"
And then you go back to that simple formula that I gave you and you go, "Oh wait a minute, efficiency is flow times pressure over power so what happens if we're low on flow, low on pressure, and high on power since flow and pressure are in the numerator of that equation and flow is in the denominator?" and I've kind of illustrated that on this next curve here where that little box would be a really good test with minimum uncertainty, that would be the average, and that would be a maximum and you can see that you technically can be well down from the rated performance curve and still potentially be told that that's an acceptable fan depending on whether or not it's a minimum average or a maximum level of uncertainty.
But the reality is that if you are that part of the box on the pressure and the flow and you're above the curve on the power that fan could be potentially down 23 percent in efficiency and yet still be declared a fan that's acceptable and that's something that I think is a little bit of a fact that shakes a lot of people up once they realize that you know often on new fan projects decisions are made whether 1 fan is perhaps 2 percent more efficient than another and they're not necessarily recognizing a window of how bad it could be if they extend it out through to what the tolerances tell them they could do. It's a bit of a complicated issue and I'm sorry to have to cover that one off so fast but I'll be dealing with that one in a bunch more depth when we meet at Charter Steel.
So I mean the way to avoid all that is to make sure that you've got a good performance guarantee document. You don't want to rely on AMCA 203 because that kind of is too one-sided if you're trying to make sure that you've got the performance you want. And the last thing here is always insist on physical model tests because we're going to get into fan laws and how you can know what the performance of a full-sized fan is based on a small fan. It's a lot cheaper to work with small fans and to test small fans from the outset.
So the last slide that I have here today is my summary slide so you know there are so many things that you can focus on in a plant but fan systems are right up there. Large motors and quite often the opportunities come about just for no other reason than people have taken the fans for granted. And it's well worth knowing a lot about your fans in order to have that as an informed discussion with fan vendors and the people who are operating the fans and those people that can make some - that are in positions where they can make some pretty simple decisions involving fans that ultimately have a lot of impact on the performance.
So I kind of hopefully have outlined this case here why it's not just the fan; it's the fan, the ductwork, it's the process, and it's all of these different things that it connects with so take this system-based approach before looking at the fan efficiency and control. I mean it's no good to improve your flow and your pressure - sorry, to optimize your fan and then come along later and improve your flow and pressure because now you might have the wrong fan for this optimized system condition.
So there's an order that that happens with always starting with the process to make sure that the process is optimized and then you work with your fans to make sure that you're delivering what you need to. It takes a little bit more time to do it this way but in the end it is the only way that really meets the requirements with this. So with that I'm concluded here and Sachin I'm not sure do we have opportunities for questions or what did you want to do with that?
Male:
So great first of all. Thank you Warren. I think it well delivered. Thank you. I'm actually looking at this tool, the webinar tool, and I'm not seeing any specific questions but participants if you have any questions you can definitely email either me, Sachin, or Warren and then we'll definitely address your questions. Actual in-plant is on April 17th and 18th, Saukville, Wisconsin. If you are interested in attending this in-plant training send us a quick email and we'll get approval from the Saukville plant and then after approval this is particularly applicable for external participants. Internal Charter Steel participants, same email to either Tari Emerson or even Katie _____ and then you know you can go from there. But we'll look forward to seeing you in Saukville, Wisconsin. That's April 17th and 18th and Warren again thank you so much for your time. It's already 1:00. Tari, do you have any closing remarks from your end?
Female:
No, just thanks to Vern and Sachin for arranging this and we look forward to seeing everybody in the next few weeks.
Male:
Yep and for my part thanks so much for the opportunity here and I'm looking forward to it. A few years ago I did quite a bit of work in Wisconsin and it's kind of fun to be back that way again so I'm looking forward to the event.
Male:
Great, great. Thank you Warren. And the recorded webinar as well as slides will be shared with all the participants today so thank you all. Have a great day and we look forward to seeing you in Saukville, Wisconsin. Thank you.