自从风扇在我们的技术社会中使用以来，就需要了解它们的性能特征、局限性和能力。为了实现实际的设计目标，在风机系统的设计和应用中，往往会忽略较大的安全系数。这导致了不经济的风机安装和运行，以及随之而来的能源浪费。根据美国空调协会制定的严格计划，对风机和风机相关设备进行实验室测试，在很大程度上克服了将一家制造商的声明与其他更保守的制造商进行比较的不确定性。 通过这种方式，AMCA风扇测试计划确实让风扇用户和风扇制造商都受益。本文回顾了美国机械工程师协会（AMCA）关于风扇测试的几份出版物，得出的结论是，指南而不是代码将更好地服务于测试过程，因为测试环境往往与任何实际应用程序相去甚远。引文:德克萨斯州达拉斯ASHRAE交易会第82卷第1部分研讨会

Ever since fans have been available for use in our technological society, there has been the need to know their performance characteristics, their limitations, and their capabilities. In order to achieve practical design objectives, large safety factors, born of ignorance, have often been the rule in fan system design and application.This has led to uneconomical fan installations and operation, with the attendant waste of energy. Laboratory testing of fans and fan related equipment under the rigorous program laid down by the Air Moving and Conditioning Association, has largely overcome the uncertainties of comparing one manufacturer's claims against other more conservative manufacturers. In this way, the AMCA fan test program has indeed benefited both the fan user and the fan manufacturer.This paper reviews several AMCA Publications that address testing of fans, coming to the conclusion that guidelines rather than codes will better serve the testing procedure, because a test environment is often so far removed from any actual application.