Ventilation and air treatment for industrial buildings

To preserve the comfort and health of industrial building occupants, it is essential to install a ventilation system or air handling unit appropriate to the premises and their uses. This equipment must be able to control ambient temperature and humidity levels, as well as indoor air quality, while avoiding draughts.

The designer of a ventilation system must prescribe an appropriate solution, taking into account numerous parameters: external environment, type of building, surface areas and volumes to be treated, number of workstations, manufacturing processes, possible pollution... The system installed must be capable of extracting hot or stale air (fumes, steam, dust, VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds)), eliminating odors and even fumes, renewing air (which can be heated or cooled), regulating temperature and humidity, and mixing the treated volume homogeneously.

The role of ventilation, combined with purification and filtration, is therefore also to reduce the quantity of pollutants in industrial workplaces to the lowest possible level. The nature of the pollutant or pollutants, their modes of emission and the extent of the polluted zone all need to be defined. After having sought to reduce pollutant emissions upstream, the ventilation system must be designed to capture, transport and reject them, then to compensate air outflows with corresponding air inlets: the ventilation network is dimensioned to maintain the premises in a vacuum with respect to the outside environment. Air arriving from outside must circulate from premises with the lowest pollution risks, to premises with the highest pollution risks, before being filtered and discharged into the atmosphere or recycled.