ABSTRACT

The axial flow fans are widely used for providing the required airflow for heat & mass transfer operations in various industrial equipment and processes. These include cooling towers for air-conditioning & ventilation, humidifiers in textile mills, air heat exchangers for various chemical processes, ventilation & exhaust as in mining industry etc. All the major industries of the national economy such as power generation, petroleum refining & petrochemicals, cement, chemicals & pharmaceuticals, fertilizer production, mining activities, textile mills, hotels etc. use large number of axial flow fans for the aforesaid operations. The axial flow fans are conventionally designed with impellers made of aluminium or mild steel. The grey area today is the inconsistency in proper aerofoil selection & dimensional stability of the metallic impellers. This leads to high power consumption & high noise levels with lesser efficiency. The leading fan manufacturers in the world have been looking at FRP axial flow fans for higher energy efficiency. The improved design of FRP fan is aimed at higher lift to drag ratio and thereby increasing the overall efficiency. The new & improved aerodynamic fan designing, composite development, structural design combined with latest manufacturing process are also expected to result in consistent quality and higher productivity. In this thesis, an axial flow fan is to be designed and modeled in 3D modeling software Pro/Engineer. The design is to be changed to increase the efficiency of the fan and analysis is to be done on the fan by changing the materials Aluminium, Mild Steel and Carbon Epoxy. Analysis is done in finite element analysis ANSYS.