Customer Reviews

Fan Handbook: Selection, Application, and Design

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The "Fan Handbook" is the finest book yet written on fan design, implementation, use, and trouble shooting. The book a delight to read and use. Mr. Bleier, unlike many techno-types, is fine writer (and I suspect re-writer) and a careful idea organizer. The work has many, many professionally shot photographs and is fully illustrated. There are no crude computer generated drawings anywhere! It's well indexed and heavily cross-referenced.

The book's slant is to the practical and explicitly avoids calculus, but it is by no means elementary. Any person with high school algebra and trig can understand the well-presented equations and solve all the case study problems with a little effort. Math phobes needn't be put off; the book is not "too" mathematical.

The only thing that prevented me from awarding five stars to this terrific book was an important omission. No mention is made of specialized fans for cooling towers. I had especially hoped to learn mo! re about design requirements for static presure regain/velocity recovery fan stacks for very large fans. But this shortcoming should not disuade any cooling tower engineers from purchasing this book, since all of the principles discussed do fully apply to cooling towers. END

As a basic primer on fan concepts, this is a good book. It also serves as a sort of non-engineer's guide to fan design and allows someone with very little knowledge or experience create a fan design of some reasonable worth.

Unfortunately, I was looking for a bit more of an in depth aerodynamic study and have yet to find a piece of literature that I like. I understand that many of the older books on cascade aerodynamics are quite good, but they are no longer in publication, and this didn't really satisfy my interests.

Particularly annoying to me is the lack of derivation of the methodology in the fan design section. Some basic magic formulas are given and then tied together with some basic velocity diagrams to yield a fan blade design methodology.

A good addition to other fan design books but incomplete by itself as it lacks any real guidelines on the mechanical design.
It should include more on impeller stressing (blade bending & hoop stress), shaft critical speed and impeller resonance.
There are a few anomalies but also some good flow information.
The axial and centrifugal flow design data is good except for centrifugal fan casings which really only covers wide, high volume designs. If you are looking for detailed centrifugal casing design for high pressure blowers then look elsewhere (I am still looking).
The chapter on system resistance is very informative. The other sections on fan applications and the different fan types is also very good.
Reviewed by:
Richard Knighton - FanMechanics