Author: Brian Farno

Application Engineering Manager with EXAIR Corporation. Father of three beautiful daughters and avid motorcycle enthusiast.

Models – Childhood vs. Modern World

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When I use the term models, I am often taken back to the plastic models I would build as a kid. The models I always focused on were classic muscle cars and some World-War 2-era aircraft. There was always something about my dad helping me with them and really deep in my mind I felt like I was building a real car. Well, like most things, the term models have changed. While there are still plastic models found, the hobby shops have dwindled in numbers and a lot of models now refer to computer-aided drawing, or CAD for short, another acronym just like I talked about last week.

Organized Chaos. As an adult, I get a slight bit of anxiety about this picture. At the same time, it brings back that feeling of looking for just the right model and having one catch my eye that I wasn’t expecting.

CAD models have really simplified the design and implementation process for anything, even buying furniture for your home. You can use free CAD software to lay out your room and render the environment. In industrial environments, a CAD model can really give the full picture of how the products will fit, what kind of mounting will be needed, and help to design the plumbing or wiring that will be needed to get to the new component. Some models even let you test the functionality or see the coverage of spray / air patterns. This gives yet another method of validation before money is spent on procuring a product for physical testing.

The best part of this is that EXAIR has an entire CAD catalog that spans across all EXAIR products and these models can be downloaded in dozens of different formats to align well with the software being used in order to meet you, our customers where they are, rather than having to conform to what we use. These EXAIR CAD downloads are accurate and extremely helpful to use as a talking point and the Application Engineers here can help you improve the implementation of our products before you even get them, so it minimizes the amount of time it takes you to install the product once it is on site. We can also talk with you how to correctly position the products and validate the placement of our products in order to best serve the application at hand.

This may not be the finished model but I am pretty sure this was the exact kit I started with over 30 years ago.

These CAD models won’t permit you to 3D print a functional product. They will, however, let you 3D print a placeholder for the product that could be physically manipulated if you need to physically validate it before purchasing. While these models aren’t quite the same as that 1968 Chey Comaro SS that I built with my dad way back when it is probably still in a box in the closet at my parents’ house, they are helpful and can give you an assurance of how the EXAIR item is going to fit. After all, assurance and validation is what a lot of building those models really was about now that I think about it.

If you need help with CAD models of EXAIR products, for some odd reason you can’t find the exact model you are looking for, that’s what our Application Engineering team is here to help with. So contact us.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Acronyms & Horses On the Hill

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I’ve discussed how I volunteer in previous blogs. Sometimes it is during work hours, others, it is outside and on the weekends. The men’s group that I am part of at church has a smaller offshoot that goes out into our community and helps however possible. The name of our group is B4. It stands for Barbecue, Beer, Bible and Brotherhood. Four things most men appreciate, and again we call it B4 for short. My nerd-self argues it should be B 4. One of the projects we just wrapped up in our local community was for an organization called BLOC at their HOH facility. More acronyms. The HOH stands for Horses On the Hill and is a horse farm that is in an urban setting. This has working gardens that they sell fruit and vegetables to the community from, as well as a working horse farm where members learn how to care for the animals and ride, as well as work on some of their own items. While this blog isn’t about horse farms, it is about acronyms and how they can easily get thrown around when dealing with compressed air and air compressors. The picture is from our last day working there when we were wrapping up some trim work and watching a storm roll in. (Now tell me you’re from the MidWest with a single picture. )

Acronyms are something that comes with almost any field of study or professional position. Professionals everywhere love to use them and many even use them with redundant words. In my previous life, I took care of MSDS for the shop I worked in. What is MSDS? Material Safety Data Sheet is what it stands for, and any chemical should have one of these to accompany it in order to know how to handle the chemical safely. Even something like a window cleaner has one. It’s very easy to ask for an MSDS Sheet on a chemical, see that redundant word there? Times have changed, and now they are known as SDS, Safety Data Sheets. Still the same premise and still just as valuable when trying to be safe. When it comes to efficiency, though, acronyms used with redundant words are just not as efficient. You know that EXAIR is all about efficiency, and we deal with quite a few acronyms, so let’s talk about how we can ensure efficiency and lack of redundancy can be used when dealing with some of our acronyms.

CFM is the most basic one out of the bunch. It stands for Cubic Feet per Minute, and it is a unit of flow over time. This flow rate is generally used when dealing with gases, hence why we use it when talking about airflow, and really plays into many aspects of our products as well as the compressed air system in a facility. The metric equivalent is often M3/min. which, for an engineer-minded person, is easier to decipher, which doesn’t help a lot. It stands for Cubic Meters per Minute and is used by everyone else in the world outside the US. Both of these units of measure are thrown around a lot in the industry though, when a different unit is actually needed in order to meet the information needed.

CFM (M3/min.) is often stated when someone may actually be looking for SCFM, which is Standard Cubic Feet per Minute. This can also be a confusing unit, as the unit revolves around a reference point in order to be able to adapt it to your point of use conditions. We use a “Standard” condition that is accepted in the industry and that is 14.5 PSIA at 69° F and 0% RH. The Ideal Gas Law is used quite a bit to help determine how the RH, temperature, and pressure all affect the volume of the gas in question.

The least used version is ACFM, which is Actual Cubic Feet per Minute and is the ACTUAL flow rate under the conditions at the point of use. If we look at the horse farm mentioned above, on that day our relative humidity was through the roof while the temperature was low, so our volume would be impacted. While you believe this may be what you need more, generally it all has to be taken to standard conditions in order to calculate across different items anyway.

The newest of the acronyms is ICFM which is based around the Inlet Cubic Feet per Minute for the air’s conditions prior to entering the compressor at all. This, again, has to do with ACFM because it is at a specific pressure, relative humidity, and temperature.

The largest benefit to discussing consumption or flow rates with any Application Engineer at EXAIR is that we know the math behind converting each of these units of measure and can often get you the information you need right then and there as you talk with us. If you have some acronym fatigue from not knowing which to use, or you are trying to determine what the “Actual” output of your compressor is, contact one of our team members today.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

EXAIR Starter Guide: Cabinet Cooler Systems

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The video guide below will share a few tips about how to prepare for the installation of your Cabinet Cooler System. These types of systems can often come across as a daunting task. EXAIR makes it simple and straightforward with our product design and availability of information as well as a team to talk to throughout the short process.

If you have any questions about Cabinet Cooler Systems that will help to protect your electrical enclosures, please contact an Application Engineer today.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

The Value of Going Back to Where it All Began

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This past week I was able to take part in one of the many incentives EXAIR offers to all of our team members, a volunteer day. EXAIR gives each employee the choice to go out into our community and choose an organization they connect with to volunteer for either a single 8-hour day or two 4-hour shifts. The past couple of years, I have reconnected with the director of the Mechanical Engineering Technology department at the University of Cincinnati where I received an undergraduate degree from to find out how I can get involved with the program and help the department that gave me the knowledge and understanding I use in my career. Much to my surprise, the first thing that came to mind for him was to be a judge at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Senior Tech Expo. This expo is where each student will showcase their Senior Design Project which they must complete in order to graduate. The judges are all alumni of their given programs and the students can elect to have their project be judged for various prizes that are donated by local companies and alumni. This was my third year judging for the MET department and there have been several of us that have networked and really get reminded of exactly where we were when we graduated and the amount of experience we lacked at the time.

There were 11 projects total in the MET discipline that were elected to be judged this year. We had 12 judges show up, so we broke into 4 teams. Three teams judged three projects while the remaining judged two larger scale projects. We judge the individuals/teams on different criteria like, communication skills, technical knowledge, presentation, complexity, marketability, and innovation. The projects my team evaluated were a hybrid system that would bolt onto an early 2000s Nissan Frontier and increase the vehicles’ efficiency, a team from the UC Battle Robotics Club, and a company-backed project to increase efficiency on vegetation mitigation equipment to better sustain power within the new equipment designs.

Each of these projects had great goals, highs, lows, oversights, learning points, and yet it was very great to see how truly vested each of these students had become in this project. They knew their subject inside and out and even when they had a pitfall come. This did not derail them, this took me back to when the team I was part of built a Basic Utility Vehicle as our project. We competed in a national competition with a vehicle which was fully funded by sponsorship we obtained and poured hours upon hours of work and sweat into it. The drivetrain which I designed did experience two different failures during our competition. Rather than loading up and taking a loss, we pushed through as a team, we made a new chain tensioner with parts from a hardware store, and found a judge with a welder nearby which permitted us to weld a broken attachment point back on. Ultimately, we took second place. A team of 4 students was only beaten by a team of 12 from Wisconsin. The experience I learned in that process and time during the competition truly taught me that if you are passionate about something you will make it happen. That’s the same level of passion I saw in each of the students that I interviewed during the judging cycle.

In the end, it really builds one of my favorite sayings, “You can’t teach experience.” Each of these students has experienced a lot, and yet they still have so much to learn. Without the volunteer program here at EXAIR, I may not have gotten to go back to my alma mater and participate as a judge for the Tech Expo. That’s an experience I have gained a lot from. Mainly, instead of asking judgmental questions, ask curiously. This often means asking open-ended questions that aren’t so pointed. This generally brings out more reasoning and explanation than one could expect and leads to a more comfortable discussion. These students all helped me to see that, and it let their passions shine straight through. Once the interviews were done, all the judges came together and dispersed $12,000 in prizes for various awards to these 11 projects within the Mechanical Engineering Technology Department. The passion I had for learning and projects still lives to this day. I still keep a list of ideas for EXAIR products that I am saving for rainy days or for the right time to test.

If you have a problem you can’t get past, need a curious question answered or need someone to share in your passion that involves industrial compressed air, moving, cleaning, cooling, coating, eliminating static, spraying, or conserving a resource, share it with us, we’ll be genuinely curious.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF