EXAIR has a direct customer overseas who I occasionally have the pleasure in helping to solve various process problems. Our customer is involved in manufacturing user interfaces for products such as car heating and cooling systems, radio remote controls and control panels for various white goods.

Their most recent project involved the elimination of static on a rubber mat which has a PCB embedded within. Given the propensity for static charges to build on the rubber surface, the customer did not want to take any chances of possible discharge to the PCB board, they installed an Ion Air Cannon at the final assembly bench where the mat and PCB board were put together and tested before moving on to be applied to another part of sub-assembly for the product.

The compact nature of the Ion Air Cannon is what made it a perfect candidate for this kind of application. In the past, similar applications in which the Ion Air Cannon proved equally effective were blowing into the sub-assemblies for heat lamp and tail lamps before the reflectors and lenses were assembled. Another great application was to discharge the padding and molded carpet that is installed into vehicles prior to handling to keep operators from receiving static discharge. Finally, blowing out gauge clusters to remove dust and debris before assembly of the clear cover was another significant source of improvement for an assembly process.

If your company is into the business of providing such sub-assemblies for automotive or perhaps “white goods” type products and you have issues with dissipating static on the assembly line, give our Application Engineers a call. The Ion Air Cannon is only one solution is a complete family of Static Elimination products that we manufacture for just such situations as these above.

Neal Raker, Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com