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7th International Conference on Cooling & Heating Technologies (ICCHT 2014) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 88 (2015) 012026 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/88/1/012026

Experimental Investigation on Design Enhancement of Axial

Fan Using Fixed Guide Vane

K M Munisamy1*, R Govindasamy, S K Thangaraju

College of Engineering, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Jalan IKRAM-UNITEN, 43009,

Kajang, Malaysia

Email: kannan@uniten.edu.my

Abstract: Airflow passes through the rotating blade in an axial flow fan will experience a helical
flow pattern. This swirling effect leads the system to experience swirl energy losses or pressure
drop yet reducing the total efficiency of the fan system. A robust tool to encounter this air spin
past the blade is by introducing guide vane to the system. Owing to its importance, a new
approach in designing outlet guide vane design for a commercial usage 1250mm diameter axial
fan with a 30° pitch angle impeller has been introduced in this paper. A single line metal of proper
curvature guide vane design technique has been adopted for this study. By choosing fan total
efficiency as a target variable to be improved, the total and static pressure on the design point were
set to be constraints. Therefore, the guide vane design was done based on the improvement target
on the static pressure in system. The research shows that, with the improvement in static pressure
by 29.63% through guide vane installation, the total fan efficiency is increased by 5.12%, thus
reduces the fan power by 5.32%. Good agreement were found, that when the fan total efficiency
increases, the power consumption of the fan is reduced. Therefore, this new approach of guide
vane design can be applied to improve axial fan performance.

1. Introduction Fans
are widely used in industrial and commercial applications such as ventilation, material handling, boilers,
refrigeration, dust collection, cooling applications and others. In industrial applications fans are
commonly used to supply ventilation or combustion air, to circulated air or other gases through
equipment and to exhaust air or other vapors from equipment. There are two primary fans that are
centrifugal and axial fan. Centrifugal fans moves the air radically outwards by centrifugal action, and then
tangentially away from the blade tips. This type of fans are normally known as blowers and suitable for
harsh operating condition, such as system with high temperatures, moist and material handling. Where
else, the axial flow fan drives the air through the impeller in approximation of an axial direction. Axial
fans utilize blades that force air to move parallel to the shaft about which the blades rotate, hence the

1
To whom any correspondence should be addressed.

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Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd 1
7th International Conference on Cooling & Heating Technologies (ICCHT 2014) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 88 (2015) 012026 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/88/1/012026

name. Owing to its cost effectiveness and multi-functional nature, the axial fan has been widely adopted
in the industrial, commercial, consumer, institutional, and residential applications. [13], [15]

Many development and researches have being carried out in optimizing the design, application and
efficiency improvement of the fan. The experimental investigation and numerical modeling techniques
have been widely used to develop and optimize the fan [1], [2]. Initially, researches have been carried out on
the design and optimization of the rotating impeller, such as investigation on the effect of installation
angle of rotor blade, forward-skewed blade effects, aerofoil filled or aerodynamic effects on blade cross
section and etc. In reference [1] the downstream flow resistance method has been developed for predicting
the fan performance and the stalling effect in a fan system. Besides that, study on effects of installing
angle setting for the rotor blade was explored in reference [2] on a axial flow fan and [4] on wells turbine ,
prior to improve the overall efficiency of the system. Apart from impeller design, investigation such as
inlet flow distortions effect, tip clearance losses estimation, noise improvement, and swirl energy losses
also have been demonstrated in references [5], [8] and [9]. Other then designs, research have been carried on
the system or method development such as, an optimization technique based on the gradient method by
reference [6] and [7], modification on the mining exhaust fan in reducing the ‘Air Stray Losses’ prior to
reduce the electric consumption to overcome the situation by [10].From the available published literatures
as mentioned, there were less works have been reported on the guide vane design and application effect in
improving axial fan performance. A paper by T.Setoguchi et.al. [3], presented the guide vane on the both
inlet and outlet side of the rotor in overcoming the lower efficient and poor starting characteristic of the
wells turbine. And in another paper by YE Zeng-Minget,al.[6] has introduced straighter vanes onto a large
generator in overcoming, thus changing the swirl energy losses into useful energy in improving the
efficiency of the system.

However, there is still room for improvement for guide vane design onto commercial usage axial fan to be
explored. Therefore, an investigation on new approach in designing a fixed guide vane for a 1250mm
diameter axial fan and its effect on improving total fan efficiency were demonstrated in this paper. An
appropriate guide vane design can improve the airflow in a fan system by reducing swirling and get a
higher efficiency, thus reducing the power consumption of the system. So, in this study, the fixed vane
was design by choosing static pressure as a target variable to be maximized in the fan system, prior to
improve the overall fan efficiency.

2. Experimental Apparatus
The experiment was conducted on a Type D test rig setup referred to AMCA 210-07 (Air Movement and
Control Association, Inc.) [12] Standard with ducted inlet and outlet schematically shown in Figure 1. The
inlet duct has a cross sectional area of 4.9 m2 and a length of 5 m. An expansion connects the inlet duct
and the test chamber which has a 64.2 m2 cross sectional area and an equivalent length of 10 m. The
downstream end of the test chamber on the other hand is connected to an outlet duct with a cross sectional
area identical to the inlet duct with a length of 3.75 m through a gradual contraction. The fan is located at
the inlet duct where at the upstream of the fan host an inlet bell and the transition allows the air to
smoothly accelerate from a static condition to a high speed flow. In this study, a 12 profile rotor blade of
1250mm diameter, 30° pitch angle axial fan with a hub to tip ratio of 0.28 and 7 mm tip clearance
selected (figure 2). Additionally, a 13 profile fixed vane is designed to compare and improve the fan
performance.

2
7th International Conference on Cooling & Heating Technologies (ICCHT 2014) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 88 (2015) 012026 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/88/1/012026

The study was conducted using an approach termed as “downstream flow resistance” method or DFR for
short to analyze the performance of the axial fan. DFR method is an approach that uses flow resistance
that exist in a fan system to gain access to the fan performance where the pressure rise before the flow
resistance and the pressure drop across the resistance region are used for the purpose of computing the
static pressure and flow rate respectively. [1] It is possible to perform an uncertainty analysis to identify a
range of values within which the true value might lie. Therefore, AMCA 210 chose an acceptable
probability of 95%. According to AMCA standards, the uncertainties in the experimental results can be
expressed in two parts, the measurement and combined uncertainties.

Figure 1. Type D test rig setup (dimension in mm).

Figure 2. Rotor blade (outer diameter 1250mm). Figure 3. Guide vane schematic diagram.

2.1. Calculation
The fan total pressure was calculated from measurements of the pressures in ducts or chambers, corrected
for pressure losses that occur in the measuring duct between the fan and the plane of measurement. A
derivation of this calculation is Eq. 1. The fan static pressure was calculated from Eq. 2 [14].

3
7th International Conference on Cooling & Heating Technologies (ICCHT 2014) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 88 (2015) 012026 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/88/1/012026

Pt  Ps 7  Pv Ps  Pt  Pv
(1) (2)
2 TN QPt K p
H t   100%
60 (3) H (4)
 Ps 
 s  t  
 Pt  (5)
As a torsion element is used to measure torque, the fan power input is calculated from the torque and the
fan rotational speed using Eq. 3[14].The fan total efficiency is the ratio of the fan power output to fan
power input, as shown in Eq. 4. With the derivation of total efficiency, the static efficiency was calculated
using Eq. 5[14].

3. Design of guide vane

There were two type of guide vane can be provided to an axial fan to reduce the rotational energy losses.
It can be located either on the outlet side called as outlet guide vane or on the inlet side called as inlet
guide vane. The outlet guide vane produce static pressure partially to the system, where else the inlet
guide vane will prepare the airflow for the blades. Since in this study, static pressure becomes the target
objective to improve the fan efficiency, therefore the outlet guide vane would be the best choice. Figure 3
shows the 2D schematic diagram of the fixed vane design respective to the 30° rotating impeller.

The guide vane with a chord length of lg = 300mm, and the end of the curvature is extended to 600mm for
the purpose of effective airflow correction and to utilize the motor place as a hub for the guide vane.
Good agreement found that the longer the straightener vane, the better airflow correction can be achieved.
[6]
The leading angle, δ of the guide vane is calculated from Eq.6 [14],

tan = (6) Va = (7)

Vr = (8) Aa = (8)

Where Va, is the axial air velocity in feet per minute through the annulus by Eq.7 and the Vr is the
rotational component in feet per minute of the helical air velocity past the blades by Eq.8.And the
Annular area in square feet if D and d are in inches, given by Eq.9 .[14]. It may be noted here that,
determination on the static pressure on the guide vane design equation will be discuss future in section 4.0
(results and discussion). Therefore, based on this calculation the angle of fixed guide vane is set to be 40°
with a constant thickness of 3 mm.

4. Results and Discussion.

In this section, results comparison has been made between without and with guide vane application for
the 1250mm, 30° angle rotor blade axial fan. Figure 5 shows the efficiency and static pressure vs. volume
airflow graph for the application of without guide vane. The highest efficiency for the without guide vane
application is 64.96% with static pressure of 300Pa for the flow rate, Q of 15.986 m3/s.(optimum point
shown in figure 4)

4
7th International Conference on Cooling & Heating Technologies (ICCHT 2014) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 88 (2015) 012026 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/88/1/012026

From the Eq.4 (section 2), it is found that the improvement in static pressure in fan system will contribute
to the overall fan efficiency to be increase, thus reduces the power consumption of the fan. Therefore, in
this study the highest point of the static pressure, 351Pa in the fan operation curve region was selected to
be improved with the guide vane application onto the system. Based on this selected target in static
pressure, the guide vane angle was calculated in section 3. The selections point the static pressure
improvement in shown in figure 5. From the application of the fixed guide vane, the static pressure were
improvement approximately to 29.63% from the without guide vane application. The comparison and the
improvement region in static pressure graph for with and without guide vane application is shown in
figure 5.

By comparing the results at approximately at the same flow rate, Q, found that the total efficiency is
increase by 5.12% at the static pressure of 304Pa for the application of with guide vane. Therefore the
optimum efficiency for the guide vane application onto 1250mm axial fan would be 70.08% as shown in
figure 6. Good agreement found that, the improvement in the total fan efficiency were obtained
approximately at the same flow rate and static pressure value on the both cases of with and with guide
vane application. This shows that, the energy losses in the system have been recovered by the guide vane
installation to the fan system without any additional energy requirement. Thus, by increase in the total
efficiency, the total power consumption of the fan have been reduce by 5.32% from the without guide
vane application. Figure 7 shows the comparison of the power consumption for with and without guide
vane application.

800 70.00
Design
point for 800 Static pressure Vs. Flow rate
700 GV 60.00 700
without GV
Fan Static Pressure, Ps(Pa)

600 600
50.00
Fan Efficiency, η (%)

500 with GV
Ps (Pa)

500
40.00 400
Ps (Pa)
400 300
ηt (%) 30.00
300 200
20.00 100
200 Improved region
0
optimum point 10.00
100 0.000 5.000 10.000 15.000 20.000 25.000
for without GV

0 0.00 Q (m3/s)
0.000 5.000 10.000 15.000 20.000 25.000

Volume Flow Rate, Q (m3/s)

Figure 4. Efficiency and static pressure curve for Figure 5. Static pressure vs. flowrate for with
without guide vane application. and without guide vane application.

800
Ps (Pa)
80.00 Power Vs. Flow rate
700 ηt (%) 70.00 14.000
without GV
Fan Static Pressure, Ps(Pa)

600 60.00 12.000 with Gv

Fan Efficiency, η (%)

500 50.00 10.000

H (kW)

400 40.00 8.000

300 30.00 6.000

200 20.00 4.000

100 optimum point 10.00 2.000

for with GV
0 0.00 0.000
0.000 5.000 10.000 15.000 20.000 25.000 0.000 5.000 10.000 15.000 20.000 25.000
Volume Flow Rate, Q (m3/s)
Q (m3/s)

Figure 6. Efficiency and static pressure curve for Figure 7. Power consumption comparison graph.
with guide vane application.

5
7th International Conference on Cooling & Heating Technologies (ICCHT 2014) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 88 (2015) 012026 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/88/1/012026

5.0 Conclusion
From the study, found that guide vane application onto axial fans would be one of the suitable solutions
prior to encounter the air swirling or losses occur in a fan system. Reducing the swirl energy losses in a
fan system can improve the total efficiency of the system. In this paper, 40° fixed guide vanes were
designed onto 30° angle blade 1250mm axial fan. The single line proper curvature guide vane designing
method was adopted with static pressure as a target objective in this study. From the comparison of the
experimental results in section 4, found that the improvement in the static pressure for a fan system,
increases the total fan efficiency of the system thus reduces the power consumption of the fan at the same
time.

References
[1] Szu Hsien Liu, Rong Fung Huang, Chuang An lin, “Computational and experimental
Investigations of performance curve of an axial fan using downstream flow resistance method”,
Experimental Thermal and Fluid Science, vol 33, pp. 827-837, 2010.
[2] Yan Xiao-kang,Wang li-jun,et.al. “Numerical and experimental investigation on effect of
installation angle of rotor blade on axial flow fan”, International Conference on Mechanical and
Electrical Technology (ICMET), 2010.
[3] Qi Mei,Liang Huizhen,Guo Chuanjiang, “ Optimized Design and Application of Axial-flow Fan”,
International Symposium on Intelligence Information Processing and Trusted Computing,
2010.7],[8]
[4] Setoguchi T., Santhakumar S., Takao M., Kim T.H., Kaneko K., “ Effect of Guide vane shape on
the performance of a Wells turbine”, Renewable Energy, vol.23, pp.1-15,2001
[5] Setoguchi T., Santhakumar S., Takao M., Kim T.H., Kaneko K, “ Amodified Wells turbine for
wave energy conversion”, Renewable Energy, vol 28,pp 79-91,2003.
[6] YE Zeng-Ming,ZHU Ting-Ting, “ Research of Guide Vane Proposal for the Single-stage Axial-
flow used in the Large Generator”, Sustainable Power Generation and Supply, 2009.
[7] Chong-hyun CHO, Soo-yong CHO, Chaesil KIM, “Development of an axial-type fan with an
optimization method”, Energy Power Eng.China, 3(4), pp.414- 422,2009
[8] C-H Cho,S-Y Cho,K-Y Ahn,Y-C Kim, “ Study of an axial-type fan design technique using an
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[9] X-Sun, Z.Yang, X.Wang, “ Effect of fan outlet guide vane on the acoustic treatment design in
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[11] L.M.C.Ferro,L.M.C Gato,A.F.O Falcao, “ Design and experimental validation of the inlet guide
vane system of a mini hydraulic bulb-turbine”, Renewable Energy,vol. 35,pp. 1920-28, 2010
[12] P Laboratory Methods of Testing Fans for Aerodynamic Performance Rating (AMCA
210/ASHRAE 51). American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers,
2008.

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7th International Conference on Cooling & Heating Technologies (ICCHT 2014) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 88 (2015) 012026 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/88/1/012026

[13] Ivor da Cunha , Terry Strack, and Saul Stricker, “ FANS &BLOWERS “ Energy Efficiency
Reference Guide ,CEATI International Inc, 2008
[14] F. Bleier, Fan Handbook: Selection, Application, and Design, 1st ed. McGraw-Hil Professional,
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[15] R. A. Wallis, Axial flow fans and ducts. Wiley, 1983.