09/05/2025
New for 2025, Best Practices EXPO & Conference announced a Blower Engineering Workshop for its Kansas City event Oct. 21-23. The workshop, led by industry expert Julie Gass, P. E., Lead Process Mechanical Engineer, Black & Veatch, is designed to equip attendees with foundational and advanced insights into blower engineering. Click here to register.
Topics span core principles, selection criteria, performance control, testing standards, maintenance strategies and piping best practices. It’ll take place Wednesday, Oct. 22, 10:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. Attendees will earn 4 PDH credits.
Julie Gass, P. E., Lead Process Mechanical Engineer, Black & Veatch
Session 1: Gain a comprehensive foundation in blower engineering, covering blower definitions, air property impacts, types, key selection and performance metrics and maintenance strategies, enabling you to specify blower systems confidently.
- Definition of “blower”
- Properties of air: temperature dependence and humidity effects
- Types and characteristics of blowers: positive displacement (PD) and centrifugal
- Main selection considerations: flow, pressure, power and cost (Capex and Opex)
- scfm, acfm, icfm conversions including mass flow vs volumetric flow
- Example applications
- System curves
- Performance curves
- Specification considerations
- Maintenance responsibilities: plant staff vs. original equipment vendor
Session 2: Gain the ability to specify the proper accessories, determine when it is necessary to specify a noise test, implement fundamental control methods, assess and evaluate blower performance, select and apply control valves and follow piping dos and don’ts for reliable system operation.
- Accessories: including inlet filters and centrifugal and PD silencer types and materials as well as vent silencers
- Noise and when to specify a noise limit
- Packaged systems
- Basic control methods: throttling and variable speed
- Controls integration
- Blower control basics: equipment protection, flow control, pressure control
- Control for wastewater applications: DO control, Most-Open Valve Control, low DO control, and other control methodologies
- ASME PTC13 test code: fundamentals and witness testing procedures
- Control valves: butterfly, iris and elliptical diaphragm
- Piping Dos and Don’ts
Julie Gass is a lead mechanical process engineer at Black & Veatch and has been specifying blowers for 35 years. Her blower designs total more than 60,000 installed horsepower across the U.S., Canada and other countries and include aeration, filter backwash, pneumatic conveying and other applications. Additionally, she is currently the co-chair of the ASME committee for PTC 13, Wire-to-Air Performance Test Code for Blower Systems.
Pre-registration required. For more information on the Blower Engineering Workshop, visit https://cabpexpo.com/blower-engineering-workshop.
About Best Practices 2025 EXPO & Conference
The Best Practices 2025 EXPO & Conference is the leading North American event focused on sustainable, safe and reliable on-site utilities powering automation. The event takes place Oct. 21-23, 2025, at the Kansas City Convention Center in Kansas City, MO. Attendees come from engineering firms, manufacturing plants and equipment companies responsible for specifying, purchasing, operating, selling and maintaining on-site utility equipment in industrial compressed air, vacuum and cooling water systems. For more information, visit https://cabpexpo.com/attend.
