Any Industrial Ventilation Experts?
 

Posting from work again. We have a bit of a problem with negative pressure in the building during the cold months. In the summer we have four swamp coolers rated at about 5000 cfm each, plus have a tendency to leave doors open. In winter, these all get closed off, but we have between 5100 and 24,000 cfm of exhaust fans and systems going at any given time. We could of course just leave some doors open, but then the workers would be too cold. I'm trying to figure out an economical way to get heated makeup air into the building.

The normal answer is to get a "unit heater" and point it where workers are working (not sure how big your building is)

Unit Heaters | Reznor

Not cheap, and wont 'bring in' warm air.

My power plant had 'wall-size' heat exchanger, designed for the purpose of lightly-heating large volumes of outside air, but I forget what the CFM is of a 2000hp fan, and it had 3 of them.

-John

What are you exhausting? No expert here but have had good results with "smog hogs" (electro static precipitators) for smoke conditions with plastics. That reduced the amount needed to exhaust.

A couple of different things. We have a lot of soldering going on, along with a few different kinds of coatings being mixed up, applied, and cured.

When heat rises would the fumes also ,I think a kitchen in a restaurant uses above air exhaust units at anypoint of heavy cooking or a large oven is currently present like a pizza shop .A code here might also apply but before asking osha or any other govt source know your laws.A local a/c and heat man should supply enough info to you if you ask about moving air around an open space and how to condition it or exhaust it.When I worked at a wetsuit shop in my younger yrs osha got involved due to a concern of fumes.The owner built a fume table that sucked any excessive fumes from our glue process ,we called it the glue table,brilliant bosses.This went out to the outside and made the air inside much more pleasant to be in ,they later built a room for this process and a required mask was mandated, still smell that glue..

I don't know if these qualify as "economical", but it sounds like what you need is an air-to-air rotary heat exchanger, which I think are typically called enthalpy wheels or thermal wheels.

Energy Recovery Wheels | What is an Enthalpy Wheel? | DAC SALES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_wheel