Month: September 2016

EXAIR’s High Velocity and Adjustable Air Jets – Now Available in Stainless Steel

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Newly released, the EXAIR High Velocity Air Jet and Adjustable Air Jet are now available in Type 303 Stainless Steel, providing greater durability, corrosion resistance and a higher maximum temperature rating of 400 °F.  Type 303 stainless steel has good resistance to mildly corrosive atmospheres along with good oxidation resistance at elevated temperatures, making the stainless steel Air Jet a great choice for blowoff or part drying in your harsh environment. Both types of Air Jets are also available in brass, for applications at 275°F and below, and when corrosion resistance is not as critical.

6013ss
Model 6013SS – High Velocity Air Jet

Air Jets utilize the Coanda Effect – wall attachment of a high velocity fluid – to produce air motion in their surroundings. As illustrated above, a small amount of compressed air to the inlet (large black arrow) is throttled through an internal ring nozzle above sonic velocity.  A vacuum is produced, resulting in large volumes of surrounding, or “free” air, being pulled in through the jet (blue arrows.)

air jet How Air Jets Work

Both the outlet and inlet can be ducted for remote positioning applications.

If the end is blocked, flow simply reverses at well below OSHA dead end pressure requirements, ensuring safe operation.

The High Velocity Air Jet comes standard with an .015″ shim, and a Shim Set is offered that includes .006″ and  .009″ shims to provide additional adjustability and control.  The Adjustable Air Jet has a variable gap design, and can be adjusted and locked to meet the required airflow and thrust parameters.

When you are needing a simple solution to reduce excessive air consumption and noise levels on compressed air blowoff operations, EXAIR has a large line of Air Nozzles and Jets to solve your problems. You can contact an Application Engineer to discuss which Air Jet or Nozzle to best fit your application.

Brian Bergmann
Application Engineer

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EXAIR Atomizing Nozzles in a Forging Plant

Published on by John BallLeave a comment

A steel forging plant was using a releasing agent in their process. This particular operation was to make a blank gear.  It started with a heated ingot that was placed in a two-part dual stamp die.  The front section of the die creates the hub of the gear, and the back section would finish the outer diameter of the gear.  The operator would use tongs to grab the hot part and place it in the front and back portion of the die.  Each time the press would cycle, a release agent would be sprayed onto the die so that the parts would not stick.  As you can see in the picture below, they had six liquid spray nozzles modified to spray the entire surface.  Two of the spray nozzles were blowing the release agent to the top portion of the die, and four spray nozzles would spray the entire bottom portion of the die.  Every time the press would cycle, the release agent would be sprayed.

Forging press with liquid spraying nozzles
Forging press with liquid spraying nozzles

At a rate of making a part every six seconds, much release agent was being sprayed. This lubrication for forging was not inexpensive, and it was adding cost to their operation.  They called EXAIR to see if we could help in this matter.

 

The EXAIR Atomizing Nozzles use compressed air to help “shear” the liquid into a very fine mist. The smaller the liquid particle size, the more surface area is created.  This is very beneficial in saving liquid material without reducing the required performance.  This customer purchased two Internal Mix Narrow Angle Round Pattern Atomizing Nozzles, model AN1040SS to replace the six liquid nozzles that he was using.  With a stainless steel construction as standard, it makes the Atomizing Nozzle very corrosion resistant and able to handle 400 deg. F (204 deg. C) temperatures.  With the narrow angle round spray pattern, they could position the Atomizing Nozzles to cover the entire top and bottom of the die (reference the photo below).  With the liquid adjustment valve, they could dial in just the right amount of release agent to keep the process running smoothly.  After the first week in modifying their operation with EXAIR Atomizing Nozzles, they noticed that they were using only half the amount of releasing agent.  This helped to cut cost in their operation, increasing their profit margin.

Forging press with EXAIR Atomizing Nozzles
Forging press with EXAIR Atomizing Nozzles

We can spray liquids very economically and efficiently. We have different types of spray patterns for three different styles.  We have the Internal Mix style for low viscosity fluids as purchased by the above customer; the External Mix for high viscosity fluids, and the Siphon Fed for unpressurized liquid systems requiring gravity or siphoning.  We can atomize liquids up to a rate of 5 gallons per minute (19 liters per minute).  If you believe that you are going through too much liquid in your process, you can contact an Application Engineer to see if we have the correct Atomizing Nozzle for you.

John Ball
Application Engineer
Email: johnball@exair.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_jb

Cold Gun Provides Cooling For CNC Router

Published on by Lee EvansLeave a comment
20160829_114406
This CNC needs a way to cool the drill and blow away chips created during machining

Precision control with CNC’s means we can achieve a near-identical output in product dimensions and quality.  And, it also means we can create an identical problem every time the machine is used.

Case in point, the CNC shown above is used to machine a 5mm piece of aluminum, but was plagued with problems preventing it from performing to its full potential.  The problem, was that when the machine would plunge into the aluminum, the plunging speed would produce excessive heat leading to a deterioration in performance and quality.  The temporary solution for such a condition is to slow down the machining speeds, but this reduces the efficiency and throughput of the machine.

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A Cold Gun can install directly onto this machine, providing cooling and light chip removal as needed

The real solution for this type of condition is to provide some sort of cooling for the drill head, and if possible, a means to remove the chips and debris from the machining area as well.  Fortunately, both of these are possible through the use of a Cold Gun Aircoolant System.

A Cold Gun in this application will provide cold air at temperatures below freezing to cool the drill, and the airflow from the Cold Gun will simultaneously clear the small chips and debris from the machining area.  And, these improvements to the application keep the workspace completely dry.  There’s no need to add a coolant collection system or to create additional work through cleaning coolant from the machined pieces once they’re complete.

If you have an application in need of a dry-cooling solution, or if you’d like to explore the possibility of removing liquid cooling from your CNC, contact an EXAIR Application Engineer.  We’ll be happy to help.

Lee Evans
Application Engineer
LeeEvans@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_LE

A Tale Of Two Cooling Applications

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

There are many, many ways to cool something down. Which method works best will depend on a number of factors, but the biggies are:

*How hot is it?
*How cool do you need it?

If you call EXAIR to discuss a cooling application, these are most likely the first questions that’ll be asked. And the answers will determine which product line we start talking about. In the title of this blog, I promised you two tales…here’s the first:

A caller from a metal fabricating shop needed to cool down metal cylinders after they were heated to 400F, and was curious to know if this was a good application for one of our products. Now, he had already answered one of our questions, so the answer to the second would tell the rest of the tale.

Turns out, they only needed to get down to 120F or so, which made this an excellent application for our Super Air Knives…they’re going to blow a laminar, high volume flow of ambient temperature air onto the part. We knew this from a past application that was so well documented that we included it in our catalog…you can read all about it on page 21 (if you don’t have one, get one – it’s free.) But for now, here’s a graph of the cooling rate comparison with the Super Air Knife:

While the fans no doubt made for large volume air movement, the laminar flow of the Super Air Knife resulted in a much faster heat transfer rate.
While the fans no doubt made for high volume air movement, it was also very turbulent.  The laminar flow of the Super Air Knife resulted in a much faster heat transfer rate.

When I showed this to the caller, that was all the convincing it took…their goal was to reach 120F in about a minute and a half.  Which, as you can see, will be no problem for the Super Air Knife.

Tale #2 is a bit different.  This was from a firearms manufacturer who needed to cool small, but hot, parts quickly, and they needed to reach room temperature.  Looking at the graph above, we know that blowing room temperature air on a hot part will cool it rapidly, until the temperature of the part begins to approach room temperature.  The solution?  Colder air, of course!

Enter the EXAIR Vortex Tube…after some discussion of the part size, shape, and their compressed air capacity, we determined the Model 3215 Medium Vortex Tube should be suitable for their operation.  By generating a cold air flow of about 20F, this replicated the higher temperature differential we see in the left-hand side of the cooling graph above…where the cooling rate was the highest.

If you’d like to talk about how “cool” an EXAIR product can make your application, give me a call.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
EXAIR Corporation
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