Design considerations for fume hoods for process plants.

Proper design of fume hoods is a necessary requisite for a clean working environment for many industrial processes. Until recently, the design of these hoods has been rather a trial and error approach and not based on sound engineering design principles. Hatch Associates have developed and applied new techniques to establish hood parameters for different industrail processes. The paper reviews the developed techniques and illustrates practical application of these techniques to the solving of difficult and comples fume hood design and operating performance problems. The scope of the paper covers the following subject areas: definitions and general considerations: evaluation of volume and heat flow rates for emission sources; local capture of process emissions; remote capture of process emissions and case studies of fume hood applications. The purpose of the paper is to detail a coherent approach in the analysis of emission problems which will result in the development of an efficient design of a fume capture hood. An efficient fume hood can provide a safe working place as well as a clean external environment. Although the techniques can be applied to smaller sources, the case studies which will be examined will be for fume hoods in the flow design range of 50 000 CFM to +1 000 000 CFM.