Fan selection software for Konwektor
A selection program covering Konwektor's whole range — roof, axial, drum, centrifugal, smoke extraction and explosion-proof fans — with operating cost built into the selection itself.
About this program
Konwektor manufactures industrial and commercial fans in Lipno, Poland, across a range that runs from residential roof units to ATEX-certified explosion-proof machines and smoke extraction fans rated for fire conditions. That breadth is the hard part: a single selection program has to serve a ventilation contractor looking for a 1 000 m³/h roof fan and a process engineer who needs a fan certified for a hazardous zone, without either of them wading through the other's catalog.
The program solves it with two entry points into the same database. An engineer who knows the duty point goes straight to the selection form, types airflow and pressure and gets ranked results. Someone who thinks in product terms browses the catalog by category or by one of fifteen application areas — professional kitchens, cleanrooms, pneumatic transport, mining and tunnels, high-temperature installations — and arrives at the same product records from the other direction.
What sets this build apart is that operating cost is not an afterthought on the datasheet. The selection form carries limits and optimisation criteria next to the duty point, and every product card has its own energy cost tab, so the fan that is cheapest to buy and the fan that is cheapest to run can be told apart before a quotation goes out. The program runs in English, German and Polish, with projects and comparisons available to registered users.
A closer look
The selection form
Three columns, three questions. On the left the six product categories and thirteen groups of filters — application area, fan type, impeller blade shape, mounting, drive, connection, motor, phases, frequency, type of control, application zone and certificates. In the middle every series in the catalog as a tile with its own photograph and the number of models it holds, from a two-model family up to fifty-four. On the right the required operating point: airflow, static or total pressure, the tolerance band around them, air density with a built-in calculator, and the regulation mode — nominal, automatic or set by hand. Limits, operating costs and optimisation criteria sit one click away on the same panel, so the engineer who cares about running cost states it before the search rather than discovering it afterwards.
Results, with every curve on one chart
The duty point stays pinned at the top of the result — airflow, pressure, density and the tolerance that was applied — so nobody has to remember what was asked for. Matching fans are grouped by series rather than listed flat, which stops one family of four sizes from crowding out the rest of the catalog, and each card shows the models that fit and how many there are. Underneath, every candidate's characteristic is drawn on a single chart with the required point marked in red, so it is immediately visible which fans sit comfortably on their curve and which are scraping the end of it. A toggle redraws the curves after regulation, and the view switches between combined and per-fan layouts.
The series page, end to end
A series is a product in its own right here, not a folder. Info, ranges, chart, technical data, files and dimensions each get their own tab, and the whole family can be exported to PDF from the header. The ranges table lists every model in the series with the parameters that separate them, so a specifier choosing between four sizes compares them in one place instead of opening four cards. Because the series carries what the whole family shares — the construction, the certificates, the application tags — adding the next size to the range means filling in what differs, not re-entering what does not.
The product card, top to bottom
One page holds everything a specifier asks for, and the tab strip stays with you as you scroll: info, energy cost, chart, acoustics, nominal data, charts, a three-dimensional characteristic, files and dimensions. Compliance is stated at the top rather than buried, next to the model name where a designer checking a specification actually looks. From the same header a single button generates the selection card as a PDF — with the computed working point rather than catalogue nominals, which is the document that ends up attached to the order. The energy cost tab is the one that settles arguments: the fan that is cheapest to buy and the fan that is cheapest to run are rarely the same fan, and here the difference is a number rather than an opinion.
Every series against every application, in one table
A comparative matrix with the series down the left and more than thirty application areas and construction features across the top — residential, general and industrial ventilation, HVAC, warehouses, dust removal, extraction systems, kitchens and professional kitchens, high-temperature installations, agriculture, mining and tunnelling, cleanrooms, ATEX zones, pneumatic transport and noise-sensitive areas, then fan type, blade shape, mounting, drive, connection and motor. A coloured dot marks what each series is suitable for. It answers the question a catalog normally cannot: not “what does this fan do” but “which of your fans may I use here at all”, which is how a designer with a hazardous zone or a hospital clean room actually starts.
Collective performance curves
Pick any set of series from the strip of tiles — select all, none or invert — and every curve they contain is drawn on one chart together. This is the view for the person who is not selecting a single fan but sizing up a range: where the families overlap, where the catalog has a gap between two of them, and which series is the right starting point for a duty that sits between the two. The same chart is what a product manager uses to see the shape of the whole portfolio on one screen.
A catalog you can enter from any direction
Not everyone arrives with a duty point. The catalog lets a customer start from what they are building instead, with fifteen application areas alongside the mechanical filters — axial, centrifugal, mixed-flow, cross-flow or diagonal; forward-curved, backward-curved, radial, straight or airfoil blades; wall, roof, duct, base or window mounting; direct, belt or clutch drive. The grid of series updates as the filters narrow, each tile carrying the product render rather than a line of text, and the row layout switch turns the grid into a dense list for anyone who prefers to scan names.
