ID And FD Fans – Usage in Core Sector Industries

ID and FD Fans are an essential component in the manufacturing process in the core sector of industry. This ID/FD process fan equipment can be called the backbone of the manufacturing process in thermal power generation, cement, steel manufacturing, fertilizers among others core industries. The draught fan is British English while its equivalent word in US English is the draft fan.

For an average urban person and even from a rural background it is not on their horizon to imagine the process fans used in core manufacturing plants. The kind of ID/FD fans used in such manufacturing plants is something most people are unaware of – this is the reason, they tend to associate industrial process fans with ventilation systems which are more ubiquitous and found in residential settings in the urban environment. These manufacturing plants in a variety of industries in the core sector like thermal power generation, cement, steel manufacturing, copper manufacturing are located in far-off places as a result a normal person has little exposure to the size.

In the case of steel manufacturing, to create steel the iron ore needs to be heated at a high temperature which needs large quantities of pulverized coal and air mixture to be fed into the furnace. This conveying or feeding of the combustible pulverized coal and air mixture into the furnace is done by forced draught fans. In addition to forced draught fans, induced draught fans could be used in combination to balance the system. Similarly forced draught fans and induced draught fans are also used in other metal manufacturing plants like aluminum and copper.
These industries are not built for small scale but for economies of scale to ensure the manufacturing can happen at the cheapest possible cost. When such large manufacturing plants are setup up there are many activities that need to be automated to ensure high volume output in the production process.

Take for example the feeding of coal into the furnace to create steam in the thermal power plant. For the sheer scale of the combustion, and the continuous support in providing pulverized coal to the furnace – there is no substitute for using an induced draught fan to feed the pulverized coal and air mixture to the furnace.

Since the core sector industry manufacturing plants are constructed away from large cities and close to the mines, the vast majority of the public is unaware of the ID / FD fans used in these large factories.

There is one more dimension to these fans, as these fans are used in moving large volumes of air (sometimes toxic fumes) and also a mixture of air and fine particles of pulverized coal, the preferred type of fan in this situation are the centrifugal fan. This is possible due to the design of the centrifugal fans.

In a centrifugal fan, the impeller is the part that faces the air and it changes the air direction by 90 degrees. This change in air direction many times enables the flow of air into a piped inlet or exhaust air. The rest of the critical fan components like the motor, shaft, the belt are not in direct interaction with the air flows, so this fan design allows only the impeller, blades, and housing to interact with the airflows. This makes the fan construction very durable and able to work in difficult conditions.

Once a centrifugal fan has proven its mettle as a process fans in the various key manufacturing operations in core sector industries. It will not be surprising that even in smaller manufacturing plants, the engineers would use the rugged and durable design of the industrial centrifugal fans for other operations after reducing the scale and making other customizations to fit the process.