A New Method for Optimizing the Air Circulation System in the Car Paint Booths

One of the main important sections of the car paint booths is the air circulation system. An appropriate circulation system should provide the feed air with standard velocity, temperature and humidity into the paint booth. Lack of quality in mentioned parameters may lead in unacceptable painting operation. To this aim, it is crucial to make a balance between the amounts of supply air from the air-handling unit and exhaust air to the exhaust tubes. Currently, the balance is achieved using dampers that its opening fraction is based on a database of previous balance conditions. In contrast, this work focuses on presenting an efficient method to improve the balance meanwhile trying to reduce the energy consumption of the air circulation system. To this goal, first a zero-dimensional model is presented to assess the pumping losses in the system. As a next step, a set ofexperiments in designed and implemented to investigate the role of each section in the pumping loss and air circulation. Detailed discussions about the results obtained fromthe experiments are presented and two solutions for improvement of the air circulation system are proposed. Using computational fluid dynamics, the proposed scenarios are simulated and their effectiveness is assessed. Results indicate that small modifications in the air channels can considerably affect the air circulation parameters while reducing the energy used in the paint booths.

A New Method for Optimizing the Air Circulation System in the Car Paint Booths Keywords:

Air Balance , Paint Booth , Energy Consumption , Air Distribution