Many of us have walked into a compressor room.  They are typically a small room that is very warm as it contains an air compressor, a dryer, and other items that create heat.   To help remove the heat, a fan is placed near the ceiling to remove as much heat as possible.  But, when the days get warmer, it makes it more difficult to keep things cool inside the compressor room.  Recently I was working with a pharmaceutical company about the issues with the operation of his dryer.

For this customer, he was using a heated-type regenerative dryer in their facility to get a -40 deg. F dew point.  It was important in their process to have very dry compressed air because it was coming in contact with powders.  As the outside temperatures began to warm up, they started to see alarms and failures with their dryer system.  With a dryer shutdown, they had a potential of water going downstream into their process.  They contacted EXAIR for a solution.

He explained the situation in a bit more detail about his desiccant type dryer.  It had two towers next to each other.  One tower would dry the compressed air while the other tower would be heated to remove any water that was adsorbed by the desiccant.  The control panel was mounted in between the desiccant towers, and it operated the switching valves and heating cycle of the dryer.  When a tower was being regenerated by heat, the ambient temperature around the control panel was getting near 140 deg. F.  With this added heat, the electronics inside would malfunction and shut down the function of the dryer.  They did have a control fan near the ceiling to try and remove the heat from the room, but it was not very effective.  They needed an alternative way to keep the dryer running.  With the location of the control panel between the two towers, there was very little room to work.  He needed something very compact, easy to mount, and effective in maintaining a cool internal temperature.

In calculating the high ambient heat and the size of the control panel, I recommended the HT4315 High Temperature Cabinet Cooler System.  It is able to handle the high ambient conditions from 125 – 200 deg. F.  With a dimension of 1.34” diameter and a length of 8”, this compact design had no problem fitting onto the panel between the towers.  Even with this small design, the model HT4315 had plenty of cooling capacity to keep the electronics inside from overheating, eliminating the concern with their dryer system shutting down.

To mount this Cabinet Cooler System, a 1 1/8” knock-out hole in the cabinet and a small wire connection hole for the thermostat are the main steps.  This makes it fast and easy to install onto the panel to start getting the cold air to  the electronics.  With a thermostat control, it will only operate the Cabinet Cooler during high temperature conditions, making the system very effective.  The design of the Cabinet Coolers has no moving parts, no motors, no Freon or condensers to clean.  Once they are installed, they are maintenance and worry-free.

If you wish not to have failures in your compressor room during the hot months, a Cabinet Cooler System can be the correct product for you.  If you need help in sizing, you can fill out the EXAIR Cabinet Cooler Sizing form and send it in to us.  For my customer mentioned above, the integrity of their compressed air system was sustained to keep their production process running smoothly.

 

John Ball
Application Engineer

Email: johnball@exair.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_jb

 

Heated Desiccant Dryer by Compressor1.  Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.