Many times when we speak to customers, they will ask us if our products will work with Nitrogen (N₂). The short answer is yes; our products will work just fine when compressed Nitrogen is used as the primary gas flow to power them. The longer answer has more to do with what the air we breathe is actually made of. Following is a table showing the
constituent parts that make up the air we breathe.

The preceding chart is courtesy of The Engineering Toolbox.

Once you look at the chart, you can see that Nitrogen makes up 78% of the total volume of the air we breathe, so the logic is that if a customer is using pure Nitrogen, the effects of an Air Knife to produce a reasonable airflow or a vortex tube to chill down a flow of N₂ is for all intents and purposes, the same.

For the un-initiated, the next question might be, “Why would someone want to use pure Nitrogen for a process anyway?”  The answer is that pure Nitrogen is a gas that does not tend to react with other substances. So it can make a good atmosphere in which to conduct many manufacturing processes that might otherwise be subject to corrosion or chemical reaction of other types if they were in contact with atmosphere that contained Oxygen (O₂). With this understanding, our products are used within those processes to blow sensitive product clean or dry. Or, perhaps the application is to keep a small chamber cool and so Nitrogen will be processed through a vortex tube before being purged into the chamber.

Here is a link to a really cool web page that explains very well, each of the constituent parts of Clean Air.

Neal Raker
Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com