How to design a duct system.

In this article we’ll be learning how to size and

design a ductwork system for efficiency. We’ll include a full worked example
as well as using CFD simulations to optimise the performance and efficiency
using SimScale. Scroll to the bottom to watch the FREE YouTube video
tutorial!
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Methods of ductwork design

There are many different methods used to design ventilation systems, the
most common ways being:

 Velocity reduction method: (Residential or small commercial

installations)
 Equal friction method: (Medium to large sized commercial
installations)
 Static regain: Very large installations (concert halls, airports and
industrial)
We’re going to focus on the equal friction method in this example as it’s the
most common method used for commercial HVAC systems and its fairly
simple to follow.

Design example
 The Building Layout
So we’ll jump straight into designing a system. We’ll use a small engineering
office as an example and we want to make a layout drawing of the building
which we’ll use for the design and calculations. This is a really simple building
it has just 4 offices a corridor and a mechanical room which is where the fan,
filters and air heater or cooler will be located.

Mid ad

Building
heating and cooling loads
The first thing we need to do is calculate the heating and cooling loads for
each room. I won’t cover how to do that in this article we’ll have to cover
that in a separate tutorial as it’s a separate subject area.

Once you have these, just tally them together to find which is the biggest
Load as we need to size the system to be able to operate at the peak
demand. The cooling load is usually the highest, as it is in this case.

Now we need to convert the cooling loads into volume flow rates but to do
that we first need to convert this to mass flow rate so we use the formula:

mdot = Q / (cp x Δt)

 Calculate air mass flow rate from
cooling load
Where mdot means mass flow rate (kg/s), the Q being the cooling load of the
room (kW), cp is the specific heat capacity of the air (kJ/kg.K) and Δt being
the temperature difference between the designed air temperature and the
design return temperature. Just to note that we will use a cp of 1.026
kJ/kg.k as standard and the delta T should be less than 10*C so we’ll use
8*c.

We know all the values for this so we can calculate the mass flow rate (how
many kilograms per second of air needs to enter the room). If we look at the
calculation for room 1, we see it requires 0.26 kg/s. So we just repeat that
calculation for the rest of the room to find all the mass flow rates.

Air mass flow

rate calculation for each room
Now we can convert these into volume flow rates. To do that we need the
specific volume or density of the air. We’ll specify 21*c and assume
atmospheric pressure of 101.325 kPa. We can look this up in our air
properties tables but I like to just use an online
calculator http://bit.ly/2tyT8yp as its quicker. So we just drop those numbers
in and we get the density of air being 1.2 kg/m3.

You see that density has the units of kg/m3 but we need specific volume
which is m3/kg so to convert that we just take the inverse which means to
calculate 1.2 to the power of -1. You can just do that in excel very quickly
(copy paste this =1.2^-1) to get the answer of 0.83m3/kg.
Now that we have that we can calculate the volume flow rate using the
formula:
vdot = mdot multiplied by v.