Month: December 2011

As an application engineer for EXAIR, I come across a variety of applications and have had the pleasure to develop a variety of applicable solutions.  With an internal base in our international division, I also make it a point to apprise myself of world affairs to know the environments in which our distributors operate.

The more I read and learn about international affairs, the more frequently I’m reminded of the large population and business potential in India.  Yesterday I was lead to read an article concerning the Indian population expansion, its potential effects on world economy, and the challenges faced by Indian civil engineers to accommodate the rapid growth.

The situation in each major city is the same.  The population boom has created a heavy demand for housing and utilities, which, at the moment, are unable to be adequately supplied in many areas.  There is a “bottleneck effect”, with far more demand than supply, this is quite a civil engineering challenge – a challenge posed to play a major determinant role in the rise of India as a world power.

The situation in India is similar to an egg processing application here in the states.

The noted application was housed in an egg treatment and processing facility.  Business had grown at a consistent rate, then due to supply chain disruptions this facility needed to ramp up production.  As production grew, new problems arose, the largest of which was overcrowding of limited conveyor space.  This overcrowding caused an overflow leading to many lost and broken eggs.

When working through the application the plant engineer was faced with a situation where more needed to be done with the same amount of equipment as before.  In order to better streamline the process we examined the critical steps in order to process the eggs.  As it turns out, the biggest delay was through the wash down and drying system in place.  The current system used a series of soft rollers which were exchanged over time to remove the excess water sprayed on the eggs by liquid nozzles.  The limited capacity of this processing function was considered a potential root cause of failure and was addressed using two Stainless Steel Super Air Knives.  The wash down and blow off process times were greatly reduced and production capacity was much higher.  (*As it turns of, this was not the only cause of concern in this application and additional measures were taken to meet production necessity.)

Although civil engineering and production engineering are separate disciplines, I feel there are areas of cross reference.  Root cause analysis is standard in any aspect of either problem, as well as solution implementation.  As with the egg processing, India’s utility and housing needs won’t be met with a single solution.  I look forward to the forthcoming ingenuity of those put in place to solve India’s population demand predicament.

Lee Evans
Application Engineer
leeevans@exair.com
@EXAIR_LE