The image above shows a chain conveyor with coated handles travelling along a production line. At this stage in their production, these handles have just left a washing station and need to be dried.  In order to finalize the drying process, some form of blow off is needed.

The existing blow off setup is shown above. This system utilizes two blower driven air knives to remove any excess water from the handles, but it is proving to be ineffective due to the turbulent nature of the airstream from a blower.  To combat this ineffectiveness, this production facility has placed an employee in front of the existing setup, using a compressed air blow off as a pretreatment procedure.

Having a line operator stationed at this point was undesirable for this customer.  What this application needed was an efficient, productive, and repeatable blow off solution that would eliminate the need for redundant personnel at this stage of production and make the process fully automated. That solution was the EXAIR Super Air Knife.

By utilizing Super Air Knives, this customer was able to create an even and laminar sheet of air to dry these handles. The smooth profile of the airflow allows maximum velocity to be maintained at a further distance from the knife than the existing setup.  This translates to higher force at further distances, which in turn translates to proper part blow off and full automation of the process (the line worker was removed from the application), thus saving cost and eliminating an unnecessary safety risk.

With a required blow off width of ~40” in this application, using (2) model 110042 42” Aluminum Super Air Knives was a perfect fit. If you have a similar, redundant blow off operation in place and would like to make it more effective in terms of results and costs, contact an EXAIR Application Engineer.

Lee Evans
Application Engineer
LeeEvans@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_LE