GERMANY – ebm-papst received a special Mention award in the Energy category for the outstanding design quality of its energy-saving fan for evaporators at the German Design Award 2016. The award is given to those products which are deemed to have a design that has especially successful aspects or solutions.

The German Design Award, which was initiated in 2012, is recognised as being one of the most widely acclaimed design competitions in the world and today enjoys an excellent reputation well beyond the circle of experts. This year, 3,400 submissions were presented to the Jury, with Gold, Winner, and Special Mention awards presented in each of the competition categories.

The jury at the awards ceremony cited the ebm-papst fan as being “A highly-functional, cleverly designed product. Its strengths are a high degree of effectiveness, a particularly high level of reliability, and a long lifespan.”

The company claim that their fan for evaporators takes a holistic approach to achieve greater efficiency than a solution composed of individual components, stating that the use of less material equates to saving energy in production. Consequenty, the energy-saving fan was designed as a complete unit, thus reducing the amount of steel and copper used by 50%, compared to conventional solutions with internal rotor motors.

The fan’s increased efficiency is principally due to the GreenTech EC motor and the one-piece impeller in HyBlade technology with profiled blade geometries and winglets. The fan consumes 30% less energy than the average evaporator fans with conventional AC motors, thanks in large part to the EC motor. The fan is assembled using one-piece mounting brackets and this process is simplified due to the flexible mounting hole circles. The company claim that this design ensures that their customers can retain the appearance of their existing applications with a guard grille. The other advantage of the fan is that, even in the case of retrofitting, the evaporator unit does not have to be disassembled.

Receiving the award, Gunter Streng, head of development at ebm-papst Mulfingen, declared that “We are thrilled with the award, because not only does the fan consume 30% less energy, it also saves about 50% in material in the manufacturing process. We already made this a top priority in the design.”