EXAIR is a company that is built around saving, sustainability, and doing the right thing. Our products focus on saving compressed air, reducing sound levels, and improving the safe operation of compressed air blow offs. EXAIR is also focused on ways to give back to our community and better our team. Over the past year EXAIR, through an employee sponsorship program, has given back to over 30 charities. This program is open to all EXAIR employees and enables us to select a charity event that we wish to participate in and EXAIR will sponsor our participation. Fortunately, many events have a charitable arm associated with them and we have a great deal of events to choose. This leads to us, the employees, being able to contribute to charities we want to, but also gets us out and doing these events and staying active.
Over the past year EXAIR has sponsored employees in over 30 different charity backed events. This list continues to grow every year and this does not include the charities that we have always supported through direct donations or volunteering, for instance.
The picture below is of our 7 person team for the Tough Mudder in Kentucky for 2016, out of the 7, 6 are employees that were all sponsored and chose to support Wounded Warrior through running the Tough Mudder for the 2nd year in a row, first time in Kentucky, and third Tough Mudder for a few of us.
EXAIR Crew at the 2016 Kentucky Tough Mudder
For myself, the best part of working for a company that not only gives to charities but encourages their employees to get out and participate within our communities, is knowing and experiencing these events together. To give an idea we had five separate departments represented at just this event.
We blog about this topic quite a bit, and almost every section of our catalog has a page set aside just for special / custom product configurations that have been created by request from many of our customers.
This is the latest and greatest special that I have seen roll through the production area here at EXAIR. This is a special 4″ 303 Stainless Steel Adjustable Air Amplifier with a 4″ Tri-Clamp flange on the discharge side and a 6″ Tri-Clamp flange on the suction side of the amplifier.
This had been an ongoing project with the customer that started with them testing a stock Adjustable Air Amplifier in the application to ensure that the performance would meet their needs. The application was to boost a low flowing fume exhaust that was causing slow downs in their production line. Fans and other traditional methods would require maintenance and would wear out. The stock Adj. Air Amplifiers exceeded their performance needs but did not easily mount into their duct work because they used all standard size tri-clamp fitting in the ducting, so the next step was to see if we could manufacture a Special Adjustable Air Amplifier just for their needs. The dimensions of the existing Adjustable Air Amplifier came close enough we were able to easily create a Flanged Adjsutable Air Amplifier that would clamp straight into their existing duct work, exceed their performance expectations, help their process, and be ready to ship within a very reasonable lead time.
Like we have said before, if a stock, cataloged, product doesn’t fit your application exactly, contact us and let us find a way to customize and fit the need.
A common question that we get about Static Eliminators is “Where is the best place to install them within our process?” While there is a definite strategy to mount the Static Eliminator at the last possible point before the application problem occurs, in some instances, you still may have to use more than one Static Eliminator in different locations.
A customer was working with plastic tubes for packaging that were roughly 1” (25mm) in diameter by 6” (152mm) long. At the beginning of the process, an operator would remove the plastic tubes from boxes and manually stack them in a hopper. They had a model 111012 Super Ion Air Knife mounted at the top of the hopper blowing down on the tubes. This helped to remove the “shock” hazard that previously existed in loading the hopper. To continue with the process from the hopper, the tubes are moved into an elevator and raised up to a feed chute in single file. They would roll down a feed chute before they would be dropped onto a conveyor belt. Just as the plastic tube would drop, static created from friction generated by the rolling action would cause one side of the plastic tube to “stick” to the prior tube, causing a jam in the system.
Jamming Area of Plastic Tubes
The customer was looking for a solution to stop the jamming. He had already mentioned that he was using the model 111012 Super Ion Air Knife at the hopper and wondered if it was working properly. A quick question quickly verified its operation. I asked if the operators were getting shocked from loading the plastic tubes into the hopper. He stated that they were not. So, the Super Ion Air Knife was removing the static charges as intended to keep the operators safe. The customer also sent pictures of the operation so I could better understand his process. From the photos, the plastic tubes were right up against each other lengthwise in the chute.
Static charges were re-generating through the movement of the parts going through the loading elevator, moving up to the feed chute, and sliding down to the conveyor; the plastic tubes were rubbing and rolling against each other. As with any non-conductive materials that are rubbed, slide against one another, or peeled, static electricity has a very good possibility to be generated or re-generated as in this case. Even though the static was being removed at the hopper, the friction between the plastic tubes caused the static to regenerate.
Since static was affecting the feed of plastic tubes onto the conveyor, we needed to re-focus our attention in this area. The problem area in this application has now become the feed chute. After talking things over with the customer, model 111006 Super Ion Air Knife was mounted above the end of the feed chute to provide an ionized airflow. It would be facing the length of the plastic tube and angled upward along the incline of the chute, setting up a good counter flow between the parts and the ionized air. Because static is a surface phenomenon, the ions have to hit the exposed surfaces to neutralize the charge. This arrangement would blanket the top surfaces of all the plastic tubes in the feed chute with ions as they roll by, neutralizing the charges before they became a problem at the end of the chute.
Super Ion Air Knife
This is only one example of EXAIR Static Eliminators reducing a static charge in packaging applications. The product works well at eliminating the jamming, feeding, tearing, discharges to operators and other similar problems encountered within the packaging environment. Do you have a similar feeding application that you feel could use some help from static elimination? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us with your application questions today!
A few months ago I helped an end user find a solution to remove residual oil from u-joints (technically termed “spiders”). As the u-joints moved through the application, lubricant would accumulate in the bottom of a collection area. This accumulation presented problems in the next phase of the process, and a method to remove the oil from the u-joints was the perfect solution.
Transfer “gutter”
Fast forward a few months and a similar application has surfaced. In the new application, tapered roller bearings are coated in lubricant and then transferred from the coating station through a metal gutter and into a transporter. At the end of the process the bearings are placed into packaging, and excessive oil is leaking through the packaging. The affected packages are deemed defective, resulting in rework for the bearing manufacturer.
Bearing transporter. After moving through this stage of the process the bearings are packaged for delivery.
Similar to the original application, we found a solution through the use of an engineered air nozzle setup. Model 1122Super Air Nozzles and 12″ Stay Set Hoses can mount to the coating station using magnetic bases. The airflow from the nozzles are then aimed over the bearings to remove excessive lubricant, effectively removing the root cause of the packaging defects.
By removing the excess lubricant at the lubricating station (which is equipped with a slotted table), the excess oil is channeled through the table and into a collection bin. The end user is then able to reclaim the same oil which would leak through the packaging and cause defects. So, in addition to solving a problem related to defects, the end user is also able to reduce wasted lubricant in the process.
Reducing defects and lowering material use in this application is made possible through the correct application of an engineered blow off solution. If you have a similar application or think an engineered solution may benefit your application, contact an EXAIR Application Engineer.
