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About This Book

FanPedia: An Intelligent Textbook on Fans & Blowers is an interactive textbook on industrial and commercial fans. It teaches the vocabulary used to describe a fan (type, arrangement, impeller, rotation and discharge, motor position, construction and accessories) and the engineering reasons behind each term, so that you can read a catalog, understand a specification and describe a fan precisely. It is built from Twin City Fan's FanPedia: The Fan & Blower Encyclopedia and Twin City Fan's current product catalogs.

Welcome from Breeze

Welcome!

Breeze the hummingbird waving welcome Hi, I'm Breeze. A single fan order has to get a dozen designations right, and by the end of this book you will be able to write one that fits, performs and installs the first time. I'll pop up in the chapters when there is a mental model worth pausing on, a shortcut, or a common mistake to avoid. Let's follow the airflow.

Why This Book

Fans move the air in nearly every building, factory, laboratory and process plant, yet the language used to describe them is dense and unforgiving. An order has to state the fan type, the arrangement, the impeller design, the rotation and discharge, the motor position, the construction class and a list of accessories. Getting any one of those wrong means a fan that does not fit, does not perform, or cannot be installed.

This book takes the content of FanPedia and turns it into a course. It is organized around a learning graph of 581 concepts in 13 categories, connected by 1,098 prerequisite links, and every concept is introduced only after the concepts it depends on. Each chapter moves from recognizing a part or configuration, to explaining why it exists, to choosing it for a given application. Instead of describing a speed change or a discharge position in prose, the book lets you change it yourself in an interactive MicroSim and watch what happens.

Who This Book Is For

The book is written for adult professional development. Its intended readers are:

  • new application engineers
  • inside and outside sales staff
  • manufacturer's representatives and distributors
  • specifying engineers
  • plant and facilities staff who need to identify, specify or order industrial and commercial fans

Prerequisites

  • High-school algebra: ratios, square and cube relationships, and reading a graph
  • Basic physical units: feet, inches, pounds, horsepower, RPM and degrees Fahrenheit
  • No prior fan, HVAC or mechanical engineering coursework is assumed

What You Will Be Able to Do

After working through the book you will be able to:

  • name the major fan families and an example product line for each, and identify the parts of a fan from an exploded view
  • explain how arrangements, rotation, discharge and motor position are designated, and write the complete designation for a fan shown in a drawing
  • read a fan curve and a catalog performance table, find the operating point, and apply the fan laws and density corrections
  • judge which fan family, impeller, arrangement, construction and accessories suit an application
  • write a complete, internally consistent fan specification, which is the capstone project in Chapter 27

The full list of learning outcomes, organized by Bloom's Taxonomy, is in the Course Description.

What This Book Does Not Cover

Aerodynamic design of impellers and housings, duct system design and HVAC load calculations, electrical design of motors and drive programming, detailed field service and repair, pricing and order entry, manufacturing processes, laboratory rating tests, and products from manufacturers other than Twin City Fan are outside the scope of this book.

How to Use This Book

The book is designed for self-paced study. Read the chapters in order: each one builds on the concepts introduced before it, and each chapter lists the concepts it covers. The book includes:

  • 27 chapters, from air, pressure and basic fan anatomy through fan families, impellers, arrangements, rotation and discharge, motors, bearings, flow control, special construction, installation, performance, catalogs and fan selection. See the list of chapters.
  • 99 MicroSims: calculators, explorers, sorters and quizzes that run in your browser, embedded in the chapters where they are used and collected in the MicroSims gallery. Twenty of them are interactive diagram overlays on FanPedia drawings: explore the labeled parts of a fan, then test yourself on them. Try each MicroSim as you reach it; changing a value yourself is the fastest way to build intuition.
  • A quiz for every chapter, 275 multiple-choice questions in all. Each answer explains why it is right and links back to the section that teaches it.
  • References for every chapter, with a note on why each source is worth reading.
  • A glossary of 581 terms, one for every concept in the learning graph.
  • An FAQ of 98 questions and answers.
  • The learning graph, an interactive map of all 581 concepts and their prerequisites. Use it to see how a topic fits into the larger picture, or to find the prerequisites of a concept you want to study out of order.
  • Search, available from any page through the search bar.

Where the Content Comes From

The book draws on three Twin City Fan sources, in this order of priority:

  1. Current Twin City Fan catalogs on tcf.com, for product lines, sizes, ratings and other data newer than FanPedia. When a current catalog and FanPedia disagree, the catalog governs.
  2. FanPedia online at tcf.com/fanpedia.
  3. FanPedia: The Fan & Blower Encyclopedia (PDF).

Worked examples and MicroSim challenges often need numbers that do not come from a specific catalog page. Those numbers are labeled illustrative: they teach a method, not the rating of a particular fan. For an actual selection, use the current catalog.

Author and Publisher

This book is written and published by Twin City Fan, the publisher of FanPedia: The Fan & Blower Encyclopedia. Questions and feedback are welcome through the Contact page.

How to Cite This Book

If you reference this textbook in training material, a proposal, a lesson plan or another publication, please use one of the following formats.

APA (7th edition)

Twin City Fan. (2026). FanPedia: An intelligent textbook on fans & blowers. https://moroshek.github.io/FanTASTIC-textbook/

Chicago (17th edition)

Twin City Fan. 2026. FanPedia: An Intelligent Textbook on Fans & Blowers. https://moroshek.github.io/FanTASTIC-textbook/.

MLA (9th edition)

FanPedia: An Intelligent Textbook on Fans & Blowers. Twin City Fan, 2026, moroshek.github.io/FanTASTIC-textbook/.

BibTeX

@book{twincityfan2026fanpedia,
  title     = {FanPedia: An Intelligent Textbook on Fans \& Blowers},
  author    = {{Twin City Fan}},
  publisher = {Twin City Fan},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://moroshek.github.io/FanTASTIC-textbook/},
  note      = {Interactive intelligent textbook}
}

To cite a specific chapter, add the chapter number and title, for example:

Twin City Fan. (2026). Chapter 1: Air, pressure and the fan. In FanPedia: An intelligent textbook on fans & blowers. https://moroshek.github.io/FanTASTIC-textbook/chapters/01-air-pressure-and-the-fan/

Copyright © 2026 Twin City Fan. All rights reserved. No part of this textbook may be reproduced, distributed or adapted without the prior written permission of Twin City Fan, except for brief quotations with attribution as permitted by law. See the full copyright notice.