Traditionally, facilities that produce smoke or oil mists often collect and exhaust the dirty air to the outside via roof-mounted blowers connected through a maze of ductwork.

By contrast, Clean Air America Inc., Rome, Ga., makes point-of-source air-filtration strategies to help reduce pollutants released to the atmosphere and slice HVAC costs.

“Any dumping of heated or cooled air to the outside is done at great expense,” said Fergie Haughton, systems sales manager at Clean Air America. “Whether it’s 0° or 97° F outside, bringing in makeup air at any volume above 50 percent is very costly. Some plants run 80 to 90 percent makeup air, and that not only throws money out the window, it also forces the HVAC system to work extremely hard. We found one new plant with the A/C coils covered with oils and soot from the welding. They were changing filters to the tune of $20,000 to $25,000 each month.”

Rather than taking an expensive, shotgun approach by managing air filtration on a plantwide basis, more facility managers area starting to target air-filtering efforts to only those areas that require them, according to Haughton.

“Heating and air conditioning costs are about $2 cfm and $4 cfm, respectively, at our plant,” said Glen Tuplin, facilities manager at F&P Georgia, manufacturer of subframe and suspension components for Honda and Nissan. The firm runs cutting, grinding, welding, stamping and painting operations.

While the original F&P plant was built in 2001 with a traditional air-ventilation system, when F&P expanded the plant in 2003, Tuplin opted to retrofit a new air-filtration system that consists of modular hoods for welding cells and dust collectors to filter and return the air instead of exhausting it.

Smoke, grinding dust, oil mist and other pollutants are collected and cleaned through modular air-filtration systems that often comprise a self-contained work center. No ducting is necessary, and all of the filtering apparatus sits above the production floor.

The use of down-flow filtering technology accounts, in part, for some of the efficiency of these modular systems. Incoming dirty air flows downward through filters positioned vertically—as opposed to at an angle—to shed dust. The filters trap most of the small particles, while larger ones fall into a dust-settling hopper. A jet-pressure wave cleans the system’s row of filters, further propelling trapped dust to move downward into the hopper.

“Our exhaust air volume is 103,000 cfm, and because the Clean Air system filters and returns plant air, it was simple math to see that we could save $200,000 annually with their system,” Tuplin said. “This strategy has really paid off. I believe the payback on our system was about 1 year, something that our own engineers and management would hardly believe.”
                                                             

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