First, Ill apologize for my really low rate of posting over the past couple of months.

Its been a busy

summer, both personally and professionally and with the blog being something that I generally do in
my spare time as more of a hobby than not, it has suffered in terms of the frequency of posting.

The reality is that the line for me between work and hobby and work and spare time is a bit fuzzy.
Frequently, after a class or out in the field, I am asked a question that turns into a fairly long,
technical discussion, often in the form of a follow-up e-mail, usually with illustrations of some sort.
When Im done with it, Im never sure if I just finished work, just finished playing or both. Probably
the latter in most cases; I always learn something when I do that and I enjoy learning.

More than once, somebody, having read through an answering e-mail has responding saying that
would make a good blog post. And after having had that happen the other day, I thought maybe I
should start doing just that; post my answers to technical questions if the topic seems worthy of
publication. If nothing else, it will likely increase the frequency at which I post since I usually do a
long technical answer every week or two, just like the one that I did last week on inlet vanes, which is
exactly where this post came from.

Specifically, one of the students in the Existing Building Commissioning Workshop Series that I teach
with Ryan Stroupe and others at the Pacific Energy Center e-mailed to ask if, when retrofitting a fan
with inlet vanes to a variable speed drive, you should remove the inlet vanes. On the one hand, they
reasoned that the inlet vanes represented an unnecessary pressure drop. But on the other hand,
they felt that they may provide some benefit by means of directing the air flow into the eye of the
fan.

It was a great question accompanied by some great observations along the lines of why you might
want to be cautions before removing the IGVs. And like most HVAC stuff, the answer is it depends,
at least as far as I have been able to determine. Before I get into my answer, I thought it might be
helpful to show a couple of pictures of inlet vanes on a fan for those who may not have had the
opportunity to see them before. Here is a picture of a set of inlet vanes on the drive side of a double
width, double inlet fan (DWDI)

and here is what they look like at the other end of the fan shaft.

Here are close-ups of the linkage system at the hub

and the perimeter.

When the vanes actuate, each individual blade rotates around the shaft running from the hub out
through the inlet cone, with all blades moving in a synchronized manner. If you think about that for a
minute, you can probably see that this would tend to direct the air flow into the fan wheel. In other
words, the potential impact goes beyond a simple restriction to flow.
Incidentally, I believe these pictures were actualy taken by a student in one of the first EBCx
workshops we did at the PEC. My recollection is they brought them in to ask a question regarding
the installation. Sadly, I did not made a note of who it was; I simply saved the pictures to the
technical pictures folder on my hard drive. But they were much clearer than the ones I have of a
similar installation, so in the interest of education, I have used them here. My thanks to whomever
provided them; if you recognize your handi-work, please let me know so I can give credit where
credit is due.

Here is a slide I use in class when I talk about this and the impact inlet vanes have on fan
performance and the fan curve.

And here is the slide I use to illustrate the effect of varying fan speed, to do the same thing, just as a
frame of reference.

Note that in both of these illustrations, the dashed horsepower curve only applies to the full speed,
non-actuated inlet vane fan curve.

The chief advantage of the variable speed approach when contrasted to inlet vanes is it does a better
job of preserving the fan efficiency. Note that the inlet vanes cause the fan curve to droop.
Changing the speed creates a little rainbow of curves similar to the base curve. If you were to plot
constant efficiency lines on the curves, you would discover that they follow the reduced speed curves
where as the drooping curves created by the inlet vanes tend to cut across the constant efficiency
curves.

If you study the pictures a bit, you may conclude that a variable speed drive is also a lot less complex
mechanically than the inlet vane system (but not necessarily technically when you think about what
is going on inside a variable frequency drive, one of the common ways to vary fan speed, but not the
only way).

This figure, scanned, from my copy of the Buffalo Fan Engineering Book, illustrates the impact inlet
guide vanes have on the flow of air through a fan wheel.

If you are interested in the details of what the Buffalo Fan Engineering Book has to say about this, I
have uploaded a .pdf scan of this section of the section of the manual that discusses inlet vanes into
my Google Documents account.

But even with out that, I think the vector diagram gives you some insight into the fact that the inlet
vanes will impact the details of the flow through the wheel. And its not a big stretch to imagine that
there might be a specific vane position which translates to a specific resultant velocity vector
through the fan wheel that could optimize performance for a give wheel at a given flow rate.

In general terms, the discussion in the Buffalo book indicates that there are trade-offs related to fan
efficiency, immunity to impacts from upstream disturbances (i.e. the vanes act as flow straighteners),
fan wheel blade fabrication complexity (a flat plate vs. a plate with a curve at the heel), and
mechanical strength of the wheel that come into play when a fan designer considers whether or not
to apply inlet vanes. Many of them are things you probably should consider if you are trying to
decide whether or not to remove the inlet vanes when you make the conversion to variable speed
operation. This seems to be especially true for backward inclined fans and radial blade fans.

What I have taken that discussion to mean is that you should be cautious with regard to removing
inlet vanes on a retrofit. If the specific fan design required fixed inlet vanes to achieve peak efficiency
and the fixed vanes were made variable to accommodate that in addition to allowing the fan
performance to be varied, then in a retrofit, you might want to retain the inlet vanes and lock them
to the position associated with peak efficiency.

If, on the other hand, the vanes were an after-market addition, or even a factory option but installed
purely to facilitate modulating the fan capacity, then they are not necessarily associated with
maintaining the peak efficiency of the wheel and they may represent a pressure loss or system effect
impact that is not required or desired if the fan is retrofitted with a VFD.

That said:

Since the idea of fixed vanes improving wheel efficiency is related to manipulating the velocity vector
relationship for the air entering the wheel, and

Since, if the wheel size and inlet size are fixed, the velocity will vary with flow,

I think it is possible that a fan that is operating over a range of flows due to variable speed operation
may in fact have a different ideal fixed position for each speed. I say this as my logical
extrapolation of the other information I mention above. Others who know more about centrifugal
machine design than I do may be able to verify or refute me (and they should, especially if I am
wrong).

As an aside, another reason I think the preceding may be true is that I think it is part of what goes on
with the control algorithms that are running on VFD equipped centrifugal chillers which are
centrifugal machines, just like fans. The ones I have watched seem to adjust inlet vane position along
with drive speed to optimize the compressor performance.

Returning to our inlet vane discussion, Dave Brown and I had an opportunity to do a crude science
experiment in this regard when we first started our retrocommissioning efforts at the facility he was
working in at the time. Specifically, there were 4 air handling systems serving meeting rooms in a
high-rise tower where inlet vane equipped fans that had been retrofitted to VFDs with the vanes
abandon in place. As is often the case, the abandonment was not robust; in one instance, bailing
wire (literally bailing wire) was holding the linkage for the vanes to keep them open.

Now, before you start thinking unkind thoughts about facility operators tolerating, or maybe even
implementing this this sort of arrangement, I would like to digress for a moment and point out:

The situation is more common that you think (or would like to believe ) (or would like to hope for).
Sometimes, the retainer is a tie-wrap instead of bailing wire. Sometimes its a bolt or screw through
the hole in the crank arm where the actuator clevis used to connect (like the picture below)
Sometimes its simply the (hopefully) normally open actuator abandon in place with no signal to it.
Seldom is it the image whomever had in mind when (if) they said that the work associated with the
retrofit included disabling the inlet guide vanes as a part of the VSD retrofit.

My guess on why this happens is that many of the retrofits were likely the result of a utility incentive
program. Since the retrofit installed a VFD, the program incented the Owner to hire an electrician to
install the drive. The electrician may or may not have understood inlet vanes let alone come
prepared to disable them in a robust manner.

Incentive programs often use cookie cutter pricing, which basically means the lucky installer has
a fixed (usually very tight) budget to accomplish the work. Its highly likely that the budget was
developed by someone who did not think about there being a need or a cost associated with
disabling the inlet vanes. Then, the work probably was bid competitively. If you have been involved
in that process, then you probably know that many times, the reason you are low bidder is that you
missed something (and sometimes the reason you are high is you know too much from having
already worked on the facility or system). So, in the case of the low bidder, you may already be in
the hole and even less inclined to spend a lot of time and money disabling inlet vanes that you did
not know existed in the first place.

As you can see from the pictures previously, the mechanism associated with making the inlet vanes
work is located on the fan housing. For most air handling systems, the fan housing is contained
inside a casing, and for many systems, the casing was furnished with out an access door.
(Incidentally, noting the absence of such is a good design review target, both during the construction
document phase and the shop drawing review phase of a commissioning process.) That means that
the operator may not even know the inlet vanes were not secured until the first time they blow
closed. At that point, after obtaining access via the removal of innumerable bolts/zip screws or
finding a reciprocating saw in the instances where an access door has not been provided (probably
50% or more of the instances) you make a temporary repair with bailing wire or a tie-wrap because
that is what you have in your pocket at the time. And, you fully intend to improve upon that later in
the day after you put out the other fires that have occurred. (All of this happening with your cell
phone ringing out of its holster due to people calling to say they are hot).

You remember that you intended to improve on the bailing wire installation as you pull into the
driveway around 2 am after dealing with a domestic water line that broke around 4 pm. So, you
make a note to rectify that first thing when you get back to the building (at 6 am, which is when you
start).

Walking through the door at 6 am the following day, you run into a very irate tenant who came into
work early and discovered their carpet was soaked with water (see previous bullet).

I know these sorts of things happen because I have been there and done that as in I have not
include obvious (in hindsight) requirements in scopes of work, been the low bidder, and been the guy
getting home at 2 am who has to be back to work at 6 am.
So, hold your tongue lest you be smitten with an inaccessible inlet guide vane system concurrently
with the activation of a sprinkler system caused by somebody hanging their freshly ironed shirt on a
sprinkler head.

Sadly, there are reasons people place these little signs and symbols around the equipment in their
facilities.

Returning to Dave Brown, me, the start of the a retrocommissioning process and the AHUs with
abandon inlet guide vanes, occasionally, the retention system would fail, the vanes would blow
closed, rooms would overheat, complaints would roll in, etc.

On one system, someone had upgraded from the bailing wire to a zip screw driven into the inlet cone
that the blade ran into if it tried to closed.

But sadly, the screw was not stainless, so while more durable than the bailing wire, eventually, it
would probably fail, especially given the marine environment at the location.

So, Dave, having lived with the problem for a while, and having gained some insight into system
effect, pressure drops, and the relationship between fan power and static pressure was thinking
great, we can cut those suckers out of there and solve the nuisance problem and get some energy
savings for the RCx project to boot and was all ready to do just that when I brought up the discussion
about the potential for the vanes to have an impact on fan efficiency.

So, he checked that out and determined that the inlet vanes were not an integral part of the fan
design. Based on his research, we decided to cut them out. But, before we did that, we set the fan up
for a flow rate based on a traverse of the mixed air plenum at the filter bank with a velgrid and
locked the speed down and documented the fan power based on the drive kW.

Then we got in there with Alberto and a reciprocating saw and cut out the vanes.

If you have never done something like this, it may seem like no big deal. But the reality is its pretty
gutsy. Basically, you are taking something that was working, albeit not as efficiently as possible, and
removed what may be an important part in a manner that is very difficult to undo. If you are wrong,
you could be in big doo-doo.

After we cut the vanes out, we restarted the fan, set it back up for the flow we tested at previously,
and discovered that, as near as we could tell, the operating point had not changed. In other words,
we were moving the same amount of air at the same fan speed with the same kW drawn by the
drive.
So, to us, that said that for this particular case, the wide open vanes had no measurable effect,
positive or negative, on the fan performance. Given that the fan was in a casing, with dimensions
meeting the rules of thumb for spacing between the fan wheel and casing wall and the fan wheel and
coil, the vanes probably did not provide any flow straightening either. And the fan bearing was
supported by other structure not related to the inlet vane system. So, bottom line was that the only
reason to remove them would be to save energy and when we did that, it had no impact.

We also surmised that the same may not be true in the general case. For instance, this was a
modular package unit, meaning that the fan section was designed to accommodate a range of flows
and a number of different fan wheel sizes and designs. And, in fact, most fans, while they have a very
specific operating condition associated with peak efficiency, in our industry, will be applied over a
range of conditions as an off the shelf solution to the requirements of a particular project. I think this
means that:

For other fan wheel designs, the vanes may have been required for peak efficiency, specifically a BI
fan based on the Buffalo Fan Engineering Book information (this might also be true for a radial blade
fan but those typically are used for exhaust, usually dirty exhaust and I dont seem them much in
HVAC applications). So, you cant assume that you can just cut them out carte blanche.

If the fan happened to be applied at the low end of its range, in terms of flow, the velocity into the
eye of the wheel would be low relative to the velocity you would see at the high end of its
application range. So, at higher velocities, the impact of the vanes might be more significant in terms
of pressure drop or system effect, especially given the square relationship between velocity and
velocity pressure and the relationship between velocity pressure and loss coefficient.

Related to all of this, Bill Michell, Director of Engineering at a high end hotel in New York discovered
that you have to be careful when you instruct contractors to remove inlet vanes as they can get
carried away with things. He inherited an under performing system when he became DOE at the
facility and when he decided they needed to go look at the fan (as in get inside the casing and look
vs. imply things from measurements), he discovered the inlet cone had been removed along with the
inlet vanes. Here is a slide I use when this discussion comes up which is built from a picture he
generously shared with me.

Obviously, a missing inlet cone has a huge impact on fan efficiency since there is basically an open
path from the high pressure discharge portion of the wheel to the low pressure inlet portion of the
wheel.

So, my bottom lines on this issue at this point in my career are (some of these are empirical based on
my field experience or analysis based on basic physics):

Dont just assume you should remove the inlet vanes, especially with a BI fan with flat plate blades or
a radial fan.

If you cant find out if fixed vanes are in integral part of the fan design:

Removing them is less likely to be an issue for fans that are not BI or radial blade.
You may be able to test in the field to see if they have an impact if you have accurate enough
instruments to measure power and flow consistently. To do it, you would need to hold a fixed flow,
vary the vane position, and see if you can measure an improvement in performance via a reduction
in power.

If you abandon them in place, even if they do impact fan efficiency, it is likely that the best position is
nearly wide open. But, for a VAV system that is varying flow with a speed change, this position may
vary with flow.

Leaving them in place and locked open is less likely to be an issue for fans that have low velocities
through the eye of the wheel vs. high velocities.

For a VAV fan that has high velocities through the eye of the wheel, these velocities (and the related
potential impact) will only be an issue at times of peak flow and load. That means that unless the
load profile is flat with a lot of time at or near peak flow, the impact of the vanes left in place is likely
minimal.

Galvanized zip screws blocking vane closure are more persistent than bailing wire. Aircraft grade
stainless steel safety wire or stainless zip screws will likely show better persistence than either of the
zip screws or bailing wire, especially in a marine environment. Bolting the actuating lever on the
linkage to something solid may be the best of all options if you are going to abandon the vanes in
place in the open position.

If you remove the vanes, dont remove the inlet cone.

David Sellers

Senior Engineer Facility Dynamics Engi