Ep. #6: Designing Effective HVLS Fan Layouts

Episode of Right from the Source features. who is an engineering project manager with Wright Heights Engineered Solutions Group. He discusses low-speed fans work and the benefits they provide. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on safety, security, and the same. Productivity, energy savings, and environmental conditions. at the loading dock and inside your industrial or commercial facility.

Thanks for listening here. Today we have with us Aaron Wiegel from Right Height HVLS fans. Aaron, thanks for being here. Yeah, you're welcome. So Aaron, first a little bit about you. So what do you uh what's your role with Red Eight? Uh I'm an engineering project manager with the Right Height Engineered Solutions Group. So we include the Revolution Fan lineup as long as a variety of barriers. Awesome. How long have you been with Ray now?

I started with Right Height in nineteen ninety nine. Uh I originally came on with Right Height Door uh at our Dubuque Iowa facility. Uh worked through the track lines and some protectors, some of the older generation stuff, and then came over to uh the aftermarket group in uh 2008.

And uh so what we want to talk about today primarily are high volume low speed fans, HVLS fans. They've been in the material handling warehouse uh type space for uh quite a few years now. Um what are some of the main benefits? The flagship HVLS fan for right height is, of course, the Revolution fan. The fans typically go into large warehouse space.

And it's not a lot of difference between what you're doing in your home. Uh you're taking that warm air that's up around the ceiling and and pushing it down with the low speed to destratify these large buildings. So, you know, inside that tall warehouse or other large building there's a temperature differential from the floor to the ceiling. So the primary application is just to push that warm air down to the floor.

Primary winter application. At the same time, throughout the South and a lot of uncontrolled industrial environments. they're strictly for personal cooling. We have customers who joke around that, you know, you can put as many speeds on them as as long as there's high. So you know, there's a lot of customers that where there's where they're hot and their employees are not comfortable. They literally install the fans, turn'em on high and and never shut em off. Are there other benefits?

Besides for the employees, is is there any benefit there for HVL TV? Yeah, sure. In in addition to, you know, personal comfort and then the energy savings uh through the destratification process, there's some more off label type uses I guess you'd say. Okay. One that we specifically identified as the sweating slab syndrome. A concrete floor will literally start to condensate itself upward or create water on the floor.

So the moving air and the evaporative effect is is one way. We've also had some crazy applications where we've dried tea leaves or we've assisted in large areas where they're stacking pallets. And they're seeing mold and mildew and just things associated with stagnant air. The large fans can push the air down through those spaces and just let that product breathe.

Again, it's the the the magic of the blade, the size of the products. You just have uh such large airflows that are beyond compare with any barrel fan or any pedestal fan you see. It's a revolutionary problem.

What are some of the the key design elements into making an H VLS fan that is gonna really do the trick? We believe that the Revolution fan is the best HVLS fan on the market. The secret sauce in our high performance level and efficiency is our Propel Air Blade. It's an aerofoil style blade, which to most people I relate to is it's like an airplane wing or a bird wing. It has that aerofoil shape. Throughout

that is just a more efficient design. Other things is when you think about a record player or anything that spins, our fan blades are really large at the at the interior. So when our fan blade is spinning, The air speed coming off the blade is the same throughout the length of the blade. Okay. So we have a nice even air velocity throughout the diameter of our finger. In comparison, all of the other competitive fans try to create an aerofoil shape.

saw a pseudo-aerofoil shape through an extruded blade. However, those blades are all like six inches at the root on the inside where they're spinning very slowly, and they're also six inches at the tip. So with this same shape spinning very quickly at the tip.

They are creating a fair amount of airflow out there, but on the interior of it where that six inch profile is spinning very slow, there's there's just not a lot of air velocity there. Right. You know, so we're almost we're two and a half times bigger. And the inside where we're spinning slowly. You can feel it as a person just walking under it. Um I've measured it with wind speed meters, uh and data acquisition equipment, some of the engineering tools.

and and it's there for sure. And uh the beauty again with our blades is that we have equivalent velocity coming off the blade throughout the entire diameter. So you can measure it with the meter and it's a it's a smooth air. Are there any other design features that kinda go into design? Optimum type of H feel like

The airfoil and the efficiency of its bl of the blade itself is is not something you can read in a book or that you can read a white paper and and learn how to do it. That comes with experience. uh with trial and error and and with with effort in the lab to determine out, you know, how exactly can we perfect this. So we we've done all of those things to just improve overall performance and efficiency.

So how long does that uh some of that like R and D process take? I mean, uh you're you're testing all these different kinds of blades and connections. How does that? The process works through collaboration with other industries, other people that have been trying to do the same things with airflow. The difference in our field is that we slowed the fan way down. So a lot of the factors that apply at those higher RPMs.

still apply at the lower speed. So we're able to to leapfrog ahead a little bit based on other industries. And then it's a continuous improvement. I believe we came out with fans in in two thousand nine. And I was on that original design team and we we had a pretty good foundation and um with that head start based on other industries we were able to come into market very good.

Now I know that Right Height has recently come out with a direct drive fan, which is this a a gearless, oiless type of motor. Can you describe some of the differences between that motor versus a traditional HVLS fan motor? Traditional geared HVLS fans start with a three-phase motor. Not quite a commodity product, but readily available for multiple manufacturers. From there, the the trick of it all is on our largest fans we want to get down to about 50 RPM.

However, these three phase motors, their nominal speeds are about eighteen hundred RPMs. So we need some type of reduction in there. Uh our fans use a two stage helical gear, so we have a pretty beefy gear up there. Uh to slow that motor speed down to the shaft speed to get to our fifty RPMs. There's multiple ways other than helical gears, there's offset gears, there's a plethora of ways to do it. All of them come with

their own handicaps, you know, they have their strengths and they have their weaknesses. Strength is, you know, reliability and cost. Uh weakness is uh you get into some noise. Uh you still have to mesh all that metal together. Um it it's hanging up above you and it's in uh typically the worst kind of application for these gears. Most of these gears are mounted with a chain and a sprocket, so the shaft is is is sideways. Those designs, the shafts are pointing straight down.

So inside of that gear there's oil and there's lubrication that's sitting on some type of small rubber seal that the shaft is spinning against and we're holding oil back. So we have this spinning steel rubber with a pool of oil above it. So definitely worst case. When we get into the the gearless aspect of it, the first thing is is we we take all the the lubrication out of there. We just have bearings and copper and uh the aluminum and the steel around it.

The other benefit is the the noise of the gear itself is gone. Our direct drive fans are completely custom winding, designed at right height, all complete custom castings designed at right height. With that winding, we were able to design the motor for the speed. So instead of just grabbing a motor off the shelf that spins 1800, we work specifically with a custom motor manufacturer to design our windings to spin 50 RPMs. with the set amount of torque to move a propeller or blitz.

Clearly, there are going to be some industries that really can benefit from something like that. You know, can you speak a little bit to that, some of uh some of those advantages that uh a direct draft? Yes, uh pharmaceuticals are are another area, food prep areas, uh general commercial areas, uh even in the warehouse environment if you're storing expensive product.

So you have expensive furniture, you have things where the packaging, you know, if you if you drop a couple of drops of oil on there, you know, which which consumer product did did right height just buy, you know, through this. potential issue we have with the uh with the other fans. So there's some liability concerns there that we've addressed.

Can you talk a little bit about uh Fan commander stations and and some of the capabilities that facilities managers have really at the Rate height has led the field with what we can do with our control systems basically from the beginning. The product started out with just, you know, the simple on off switch, on off reverse switch, and another speed dial. We began networking fans early on. There was a need for facilities managers just to resolve employee problems.

This person wants to run the fan full speed, this person wants to shut it off. So we devised the fan commander system uh originally where we would run a wire from fan to fan to fan and then wire into a touch screen and and network eighteen fans. from a single location, typically in a control room or in a manager's room. It gave us the ability to do a couple other cool things with starting and stopping the fans on a schedule.

So the fans come on when the employees enter the building and they go off when the employees leave the building. We gave the ability to do that same thing with speed control. So if you just wanna run low speed, you know, through the wintertime and use your destratification. we could build these automatic on off and speed functions into a touch screen controller.

So the next step is we ti started tying into building automation systems. A lot of the large factories, uh warehouses, production facilities have A master building control system that locks and unlocks the doors, keeps the lights on, runs the air conditioning, does all kinds of different So uh with our touchscreen controller, the fan commander, uh one point oh original, we we started tying into these building automation systems. So we started communicating with the higher level building systems.

And they took over some of these functions we've talked about with speed and on-off and everything. So the the building integration is the is the highest level of of control and the most technical from our standpoint, but we're doing it every day. So as we move forward and with the introduction of the direct drive

Uh we introduced the fan commander two point oh. So like any touch screen, you know, we made the screen a little bit bigger. We had a little better resolution on it. Uh we upgraded all the graphics. Um we've listened to all of the concerns or wish lists from our customers and integrate all these new features. Most importantly is we've eliminated the need to to pull Hmm. you know, up to four or five thousand feet of cable in your building. So now we're communicating on a pure wireless basis.

From our controller, from our fan to our fan. Oh, it's so cool. So we've eliminated a huge portion of the install. We had customers with the original product, they would install it all, and they would say, I can't seem to get it to work and we're like, Well, can you check your wired connections? And they're like, we had to pull a wire?

Like they didn't understand that they had to pull all this wire up through their building, you know, and up and down and around all of their equipment that a lot of that stuff can't shut down. So with the fan commander two point oh A revolution traditional fan, revolution direct drive fan, we now control everything wireless. I can I I can dig into to how it all works. Every fan is equipped with a transmitter and a receiver. So you know, each one can talk and each one can listen.

Not only can they can they transmit and receive directly to our fan commander 2.0, touch screen control station, they can communicate with each other. So we're able to lay out mesh networks within large buildings. where we can have redundant communications from fan to fan to fan or from fan to controller or fan to fan to controller so we can cover vast distances and large buildings uh with this system. Um it's each fan gets a number when we install it.

So there's some setup stuff that you just go through the touch screen and set'em all up and and number all the fans. and it's completely expandable or if you move fans around your building, you you just plug'em in and they start sending out, Hey, I'm number four. Is anybody out there?

And maybe fan commander two point zero will respond back, yeah, I gotcha. Or maybe fan eight has to say, yeah, I gotcha number four, I'll tell the the the top fan commander that you're here. Right. So they're cu the fans are communicating with each other and communicating directly with the control.

What kinds of applications really are we are we talking about in in this sort of Yeah, well the you know, from the engineers' eyes we want to go bigger and better all the way through. We're we're we're still digging into the true limitations of our hardware on the wireless.

Uh however it could be simple as you walk inside the door and you touch our controller like a light switch and it turns one fan on in the middle of the room. We equip every fan uh that right height ship has this wireless communication on it. The fan commander touchscreen is our control mode. So the beauty of it is it's scalable. You can put it on one fan and you can put it within line of sight. Uh you can put it on multiple fans throughout a large building. In in our factory where I test it.

We're running about eight hundred feet through the building, through a block wall, through a steel clad wall. in getting a very weak signal from our farthest fan. That's just kind of a cool thing to say because we have fifteen fans in our building and that farthest fan talks to the one that's halfway that talks to the one that's next to it. So I mean we we have strong communication systems. The hardware itself is designed uh exterior we can reach about twenty six miles.

Well if there's anything else that you feel like we might have missed on that you wanna talk about either with the uh the fan commander two point oh or with uh HVLS fans themselves. Yeah, I'd like to back up a little into the the construction of the fan. We carry a redundancy story throughout the entire fan design. So we look at eliminating all single point failures. So if something goes horribly wrong, worst case

Earthquake, asteroid strike, everything all at the same time. How do we make sure our fans stay hanging from the ceiling? In a safe state. So our story of redundancy starts with our blade tub connection. We have machined aluminum pieces on our fan arm and on our blade that slide together. Through that connection, we also bolt.

If the bolt is completely removed or someone forgets to put the bolt in, the fan blade will remain attached to the hub while the fan is spinning without coming out. So the first connection is our machine fit. The second connection is the bolt for redundancy. As we come up from the fan from there, if that gear shaft breaks or something happens that shears that, all of the fan blades are tied together with a safety ring, and it will fall and the safety ring will catch.

And then through all of those components we run a very strong wire rope steel cable down through the fan that you again attach to the rafters. So no matter what happens, that fan is secure in the ceiling at all times. That is good to know. The sky is not falling here in this bigger story. Never. Never. Perfect. Well hey, Aaron, we appreciate you being on the podcast and uh sharing all the this information with us. Right.

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