A gypsum facility was having issues in losing powder from the tailings in their conveying system. The conveyor moved gypsum from their processing plant to an outside silo bin location for loading and transportation. The conveyor that they used was 60” wide. As the conveyor went around the end to dump the gypsum powder, some of the material would stick to the belt and collect on the floor underneath. Depending on production rates, they would have to stop the operation to clean up the floor which added additional hours for custodial work. The customer sent a picture of the problem and wondered if EXAIR could help them with this application.
The facility did an annual cost projection to determine the loss of money from the gypsum material collecting under the conveyor. The custodial cost to clean up the excess powder was roughly $45,000/year. The unscheduled downtime was estimated at 115 hours per year. (They did not share the loss of dollars in production to EXAIR.) But it was large enough that they needed a solution from EXAIR. (The photo below is similar to the same application as written by Lee Evans: “EXAIR Super Air Knives Improve Process in an Aluminum Rodding Shop“.)
I suggested a model 110260PKI Super Air Knife Kit for this application. The Super Air Knife was 60” in length to cover the conveyor belt. The kit included a filter, a regulator, and a shim set to “dial” in the minimum amount of force to remove the material. This gives the customer the most flexibility when using an EXAIR Super Air Knife. The “PKI” suffix at the end of the model number indicates our Plumbing Kit. This kit which is Installed on the Super Air Knife allows for ease of installation to compressed air connections and it also allows for the proper airflow to get a consistent blow-off across the entire length of the Super Air Knife.
At EXAIR, we pride ourselves in energy efficiency. Compressed air is expensive to make, so why not use it as efficiently as you can? The Super Air Knife has a 40:1 amplification ratio which allows 40 parts of ambient “free” air for every 1 part of compressed air. And, with the “dirty” environment at the gypsum facility, the Super Air Knife would not be affected as they do not require a motor that can fail or a maintenance program to perform. After installing the model 110260PKI, the gypsum powder was no longer collecting on the floor underneath. If we look at the cost of removing the hourly rate of the custodian, the Return on Investment, ROI, was only 27 days (and this did not include the increase in production rates).
Spillage is wasteful, costly, and time consuming to cleanup. If you have excess waste from your conveying system, EXAIR will have the product to help you. For the gypsum facility above, the Super Air Knife Kit made it possible to increase production efficiencies with a short ROI. You can contact an Application Engineer to review your application and see if we can improve your conveying operation.
John Ball
Application Engineer
Email: johnball@exair.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_jb