Name: Air Filter Life Extender

The customer wanted to extend the air filter life on their environmental hood enclosures for working with hazardous materials.

Overview: Working with hazardous materials requires a recirculation/filtration of internal air while maintaining a negative pressure to prevent hazardous material from escaping. If the life of the filters could be extended, the uptime would be greatly improved and maintenance costs lowered.

Application benefit: By changing the speed of the motor, constant internal hood airflow over a wide range of filter loading was possible; thus greatly increasing the filter life and lowering costs.

The customer's product: The customer's products are environmental hood enclosures used for working with hazardous materials. These hood enclosures recirculate the internal air through the filters while maintaining a negative pressure to minimize escaped air.

The customer's present solution: With the present air filter system, when the filter contamination increases to 25% loading, the filters have to be cleaned or replaced, or the speed control manually adjusted. The cost of the frequent filter maintenance is downtime, replacement filters, a possible service call, and possible recalibration and/or recertification of the equipment. The customer's request was to extend the filter life by replacing the present control with a Variable Frequency Drive (VFD).

KB analyzed the customer's existing system in the KB engineering lab, accurately simulating the blocked filters using detailed calibration data provided by the client for various filter loads.

KB's capabilities for solving the problem: For the Variable Frequency Drive, it's the KBVF series. This series incorporates a powerful, second-generation, micro-controller that is programmable for custom OEM applications using software that has proprietary motor monitoring capabilities. KB's engineering staff has a reputation for working directly with customer applications to reach satisfactory solutions.

The KB solution: The objective was to maintain constant internal hood airflow over a wide range of filter loading by varying the speed of the motor. The KBVF software was redesigned to increase the speed of the fan motor to maintain a constant airflow rate. The second step incorporated a customized graphic user interface (GUI) set-up on a PC using KB's DriveLink. The GUI software allowed easy initiation of the specific application parameters.

The results: Using the KBVF-26D with DriveLink PC program and custom algorithms, the filter loading was increased 400% allowing the filters to trap 4 times more contaminants than the previous product.

Customer's strategic advantage: The customer got exactly what he wanted - no more, no less - and enjoyed the benefits of extended air filter life, lower maintenance costs, and significant performance enhancement; all of which gave him a major advantage over the competition.

A Win-Win solution for both the customer and KB.