Robinson Fans has more than 100 years of experience in building air movement solutions.

Premier Business Partners:

J.P. America, Inc.

Zelienople, Pa.-based Robinson Fans has become an expert in designing high-quality industrial fans and customizing them to meet customers’ individual needs. It produces these fans for customers all over the world. “Robinson Fans’ industry ex­perts take the time to thoroughly analyze all of our customers’ system requirements so we can provide cost-efficient solutions for each particular application, whether it is an industrial fan, damper, blower or exhauster,” the company says.

“We try to get the best sense of what the marketplace needs at any specific time,” President Carl Staible says. “We’re trying to be as agile as we can in terms of adjusting to demands and modernizing.”

This kind of adjustment and diversification is not new for Robinson Fans; it has served multiple industries since 1892. Today, it is following the resurgence in demand for fans in the oil refining industry, as well as in market sectors such as pollution control and food pro­cessing, mining, pulp and paper, ce­ment, chemical processing, steel and power.

Innovation At Work
Robinson Fans has more than 100 years of know-how, including experience in building air movement solutions for power generation, rock and carbon products, thermal treatment, ceramics, air pollution, biofuel, and ferrous and non-ferrous metals. The company has made a name for itself in advanced design and testing procedures, which include computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, finite element analysis (FEA) and rotordynamics analyses, as well as physical model testing in the company’s Air Movement and Control Association-accredited laboratory.

“By using CFD analysis, [we] recently developed an innovative coal mill ex­hauster with significant improvements over the traditional whizzer wheel de­sign,” the company says. “Used to move pulverized coal to burners in the power, cement and lime industries, [our] new backward-curve design show­ed an improvement of more than 20 percent in static pressure.” This innovation reduced the machine’s wear, making it more durable for coal mill exhausters.

Its CFD and FEA capabilities made possible the excavation of the world’s deepest nickel mine in Sudbury, Canada, the company says. “Teaming with mining-leader Inco Limited and construction management expert Hatch Associates, Robinson designed, manufactured and tested three centrifugal fans that allow ventilation to reach new depths in the Creighton Mine,” the company says.

Serious About Service
Robinson Fans provides preventive maintenance to customers to keep their process and ventilation fans in working order. This includes repairing and rebuilding, installation and inspection.

New Sandboxes
Although Robinson Fans has continually satisfied customers for more than a century, it still has the ability to take a hard look at where it needs to improve, and take the necessary steps to do so. Staible says the company is working to improve its delivery times and give customers more accurate and up-to-date feedback on order status.

The company installed a new enterprise resource planning system in 2007 and embraced a more horizontal management structure. “We’re beginning to reap the benefits,” Staible says. “We can more effectively make decisions as to where the holes in our manufacturing pro­cess are.”

Staible says the company’s best shot in such a competitive market is to continue to improve its efficiencies and re­main as agile as possible. “We’ve been allowing the economy to push us down, and now we’re starting to push back,” he says. “We don’t anticipate that the marketplace is going to get turned around very fast, but what we have to do is find more sandboxes for us to play in and figure out where the opportunities may be.”