toddreg
21-03-2009, 02:24 PM
My situation involves a printing company whereby temp and humidity are important variables due to their impact on paper. Static and curling become issues at times. Also, we are located in Georgia so the summers are pretty hot.
We have two machines exhausted to the outdoors that together move between 6000-12500 cfm depending on if both are running and which components of the machines are being utilized. I should mention that we just added the second machine and in the past struggled to keep the press room cool in summer afternoons with the one machine. Now with the second I am anticipating the task to be impossible. Obviously, this much air must make its way back into the building through every crack and crevice. Overall plant size is 45,000 sq ft in three openly connected sections.
As it is now due to the suction, we are pulling air from throughout the facility and cooling the building is very difficult. I would guess that trying to cool 12500 cfm of external make up air to be prohibitively expensive. If we dropped a duct in near the source of extraction on these machines, would this help by allowing outside air to basically circulate through the machine and right back out? Could this scenario alleviate a significant amount of the extraction of cooled air from throughout the facility?
Any other ideas for dealing with this situation? Also, what would be a ball park guestimate of the cost to provide cooled and dehumidified make up air? I would anticipate that such a conditioned make up air system to be very complicated by the fact that the amount of air exhausted varies continuously throughout the day as the machines come on and off.
We have two machines exhausted to the outdoors that together move between 6000-12500 cfm depending on if both are running and which components of the machines are being utilized. I should mention that we just added the second machine and in the past struggled to keep the press room cool in summer afternoons with the one machine. Now with the second I am anticipating the task to be impossible. Obviously, this much air must make its way back into the building through every crack and crevice. Overall plant size is 45,000 sq ft in three openly connected sections.
As it is now due to the suction, we are pulling air from throughout the facility and cooling the building is very difficult. I would guess that trying to cool 12500 cfm of external make up air to be prohibitively expensive. If we dropped a duct in near the source of extraction on these machines, would this help by allowing outside air to basically circulate through the machine and right back out? Could this scenario alleviate a significant amount of the extraction of cooled air from throughout the facility?
Any other ideas for dealing with this situation? Also, what would be a ball park guestimate of the cost to provide cooled and dehumidified make up air? I would anticipate that such a conditioned make up air system to be very complicated by the fact that the amount of air exhausted varies continuously throughout the day as the machines come on and off.