Month: July 2016

Stainless Super Air Knife Used In Seafood Application

Published on by exaircorpLeave a comment

I was recently contacted by an Alaskan seafood company that was looking for a better solution for blowing off the conveyors in their processing procedure. This particular company has their own dedicated fisherman that actually catch their own seafood and freeze it right onboard their state-of-the-art vessels to ensure they are providing the freshest product. Once they return to land, the fresh catch is transferred via belt conveyors into their processing plant where it passes through their rigorous safety and quality protocol and packaged for shipment.

The seafood passes through a wash/rinse process where it then passes under a section of aluminum pipe with drilled holes to blow off any residual solution remaining on the product. The issue with the current setup were two fold: First, the drilled pipe was creating a sporadic airflow, which wasn’t providing effective blowoff, causing the product to fail inspection and the need for an operator to manually clean the product or worse, scrap it altogether. Secondly, the drilled aluminum pipe was unable to hold up to the corrosive nature of the environment due to the salt in the air and was beginning to break down and contaminate the product. The customer was thinking of just upgrading the pipe to stainless and while this would provide better compatibility with the environment, it still wouldn’t remedy the need for a more balanced airflow.

After further discussing the application, I recommended the customer use our 24″ Stainless Steel Super Air Knife. The Super Air Knife produces a high velocity, even sheet of air across the length of the knife, in contrast to the disrupted flow they were seeing from the drilled pipe. In addition, the Stainless Steel construction provides the needed corrosion resistance to withstand the aggressive, salt water atmosphere and minimize the possibility of contaminating their product.

Super Air Knife
Super Air Knife – Available in aluminum, 303ss or 316ss in lengths from 3″ up to 108″.

Although not a concern to this particular customer, I explained another benefit of using the Super Air Knife over the drilled pipe and that would be the compressed air usage.  Drilled pipe wastes a ton of air and puts a high demand on the air compressor, resulting in high operating costs. The Super Air Knife is a much more efficient solution as it only consumes 2.9 SCFM per inch of knife when operated at 80 PSIG, keeping the operating cost down while providing superior blow off results.

If you have a similar need or to discuss your process, please contact one of our application engineers for assistance.

Justin Nicholl
Application Engineer
mailto:justinnicholl@exair.com
@EXAIR_JN

 

Conveying Valve Keepers with a Line Vac Air Operated Conveyor

Published on by Lee EvansLeave a comment
2905843404_d33353488d_z
Valve keepers

In some of my previous blogs I’ve written about rebuilding engines at home, usually finding a decent car that suffered top-end engine damage.  Sometimes the root cause is a lack of oil pressure, other times it is a failed component in the valve train, or something as simple as a broken timing belt.  In any case, these rebuilds tend to involve removing the cylinder heads from the engine, disassembling them and replacing the damaged components.

Capture
These valve keepers need to be pneumatically conveyed

A commonly damaged component with timing belt or valve train failure is the valve.  And, removing the valve means removing the valve keepers, which are the items shown above.

I received an email from our distributor in Italy, searching for a solution to convey these valve keepers at a rate of approximately 5000 per hour over a distance of 3 meters and a height of 4 meters.  The valve keepers are quite light, weighing just 0.29 grams each – a perfect fit for use with the Line Vac.

When considering a conveyance application we take into account several variables such as:

Bulk density of the material

Shape/size of the material

Conveying distance

Conveying height

Required conveyance rate

Available compressed air supply

Given the need to convey 5000 valve keepers per hour at a weight of 0.29 grams/valve keeper, we only needed to move ~1.5kg per hour for this application.  When considering the height and distance involved, and the size of the valve keepers, we can comfortable convey these units with a ¾” Line Vac or a 1” Line Vac.  Using 10.7 and 14.7 SCFM, respectively, these options provide a suitable solution with a low compressed air demand.

If you have an application in need of a compressed air solution, contact an EXAIR Application Engineer.  We’ll be happy to help.

Lee Evans
Application Engineer
LeeEvans@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_LE

1st photo credit to Benjamin Hirsch (Creative Commons License)

A Lot Can Happen In Five Years

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

Five years ago, I wrote a blog about my (then) 11 year old son’s first-ever week away from home at Boy Scout Summer Camp. He’s departing again this weekend, but his troop has decided to venture “out of Council” this year, to Camp Howard W. Wall…it’s on the south coast of the island of St. Croix, in the US Virgin Islands.

They met last week to cover the final (and finer) details of international travel, flight schedules, logistics, etc., and activities…Camp Friedlander has a “blob:”

But Camp Wall has an OCEAN:

Just to put the distance into perspective...
Just to put the distance into perspective…

I’ve been thinking a LOT about the changes I’ve seen in the wide-eyed kid I dropped off at a camp that I drive past twice a day, and the smirking teenager that I’m driving to the airport on Sunday morning. And those changes are providing perspective on not only how fast those five years have passed, but how much can happen in that span.

In 2011, I was a wide-eyed “Dread Newbie” at EXAIR.  One of my very first meetings with the rest of the gang was to be trained on our brand new Atomizing Spray Nozzles…we only had three styles to choose from, but two of them came in four distinct models, and one came in FIVE. They were ALL Internal Mix, because hey, who doesn’t like the maximum range of adjustability that comes with being able to vary your flow rate and spray pattern size by adjusting liquid AND air supply pressures?

OK; it turns out that was just the beginning…within the year, our Engineering Department had developed:

External Mix – three styles, thirteen distinct models, to allow for independent adjustment of flow rate (by liquid pressure) and spray pattern (by air pressure.)

Siphon Fed – two styles, seven distinct models, that could be siphon OR gravity fed, for situations where it’s not practical to pressurize the liquid supply.

And, four years after that, looking back, it seems like THAT was just the beginning…we now have:

*Two sizes – the original 1/4 NPT and the new(er) 1/2 NPT.
*Sixteen styles – each available with our No-Drip option (so technically I guess we have thirty-two)
*Forty-five distinct models – we’ve got a flow rate/spray pattern combination for just about any application

And, like the rest of our catalog products, they’re all in stock, ready to ship today, on time, like we do 99.97% of the time…that’s actually one thing that HASN’T changed in the 17 years that we’ve been keeping track.

If you’d like to talk about Spray Nozzles…or any EXAIR products (old or new,) give me a call.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
Find us on the Web
Follow me on Twitter
Like us on Facebook