How to Design Restaurant Kitchen Ventilation Engineering

How should restaurant kitchen ventilation be designed? Kitchens are heavy with fumes that harm staff health. Ventilation removes those fumes and brings in fresh air. CHINENG outlines the design principles below.

Design principles for restaurant kitchen ventilation

1. Do not use recirculating AC in cooking rooms—split units, VRF, fan-coils, or return-air all-air systems degrade as grease fouls coils. If cooling is required, use 100% outdoor-air AC; otherwise use supply and exhaust (fume) systems.

2. Keep horizontal exhaust ducts short and slope them toward the hood; keep duct velocity above about 8 m/s to reduce grease deposition and long-term performance loss.

3. Separate exhaust systems by operating hours and function. Sharing one system among rooms with different schedules wastes energy whenever any room is in use.

4. Besides cooking exhaust, provide general exhaust for the kitchen and support rooms. Hood exhaust runs during cooking; general exhaust handles background ventilation and keeps the kitchen negative.

5. Design makeup air for both cooking exhaust and general exhaust: when hoods run, supply enough makeup; when only general exhaust runs, AC outdoor air alone can often cover it. A typical approach combines AC outdoor air with natural makeup for hood duty.

6. Fit fume filtration to local environmental rules—electrostatic filters, absorption separators, water-wash hoods, and similar. Water-wash hoods can reach about 93% grease separation; allow roughly 100–150 Pa pressure drop if estimating from catalogs.

7. Prefer kitchen-duty axial fans or boxed fans with external motors. Ordinary axial motors fouled by grease often overheat and fail.

That covers restaurant kitchen ventilation design. Follow the CHINENG website for more engineering, equipment, design, installation, and service content.