Category: Customer Service

Supporting The Next Generation of Engineers

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

A while back, I was lucky enough to spearhead a donation from EXAIR to The University of Cincinnati’s 1819 Innovation Hub Makerspace. For the past several years, we have been sponsoring the UC Combat Robotics club, which uses the Makerspace to build its bots and learn more about the applications of its course of study. This facility is open to all students who attend the university. The course of study does not matter; the desire to learn appropriate usage of equipment and a determination to create are all that is needed.

The space puts every student through training for safety and manufacturing processes, if needed, and then the students can operate on their own. The staff in the space are often students themselves, or they are people with years of industry experience to share with the students utilizing the space. This 12,000 square-foot makerspace and fab lab is home to a variety of equipment that can all be seen on their equipment listing here. You can go in and learn how to use anything from a sewing machine or soldering iron, all the way up to a 4-axis CNC machine. If you just have an idea and desire to learn, the staff will even train you on how to make the idea come to life and do it all safely in a semi-controlled environment.

When we saw the need for safe, efficient use of compressed air in this space, EXAIR stepped in to help. We outfitted every air drop in the facility and every machine with an EXAIR VariBlast Precision Safety Air Gun w/ Chip Shield and Nano Super Air Nozzle. This will help keep all the operators safe by eliminating the risk of exceeding 30 psig dead-end pressure and also reducing the operating noise level to below the OSHA standard of 85 dBA, all the way down to 75 dBA. By keeping the entire facility uniform, they are also able to make purchasing new units easier when they are needed.

We also helped them assemble their new EXAIR Chip Trapper System to help recycle the coolant from their CNC machines and help them extend the life of their cutting fluid by being able to remove all the debris from their sumps, reducing the surface area on which bacteria can grow.

On top of both of these, we helped them to see how easy a Cold Gun is to mount onto the side of virtually any machine in their shop, even the industrial sewing machine, and showed them just how beneficial it can be. There was actually a group of students using one of the stationary belt sanders, and we were able to connect the Cold Gun to the closest air drop, use the magnet to hold it onto the housing of the sander, and position the single-point cold outlet to the contact point to keep the sandpaper and material cooler to prevent loading up of the sandpaper.

These were just a couple of the products we were able to share with them in order to help outfit their space with safe and efficient compressed air products. I’ve condensed the entire event down into a 50-second clip if you would like to watch. I feel like we need some classic Benny Hill music in the background.

I think the best part of this experience for me was the discussion that evolved as we unpacked all the items. We had already had lots of chatter back and forth around what their system is capable of and also what they plan to do with the EXAIR products. Then, as we are unpacking and discussing the capabilities, more applications started to come up. I have a feeling this is just part of what happens in this space. Ideas are born, then brought into fruition, all within these walls.

Special thanks to Benjamin Jones and his team for letting us be part of training the future leaders in the industry.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS
National Business Development Manager

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Rule #1 – Always Look Cool

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

The past two weeks here in Cincinnati have reminded me just what humidity is all about. While the static charge in my garage at home is at an all-time low, the humidity is enough to make me wish I had gills to breathe. Even rucking before work has become a rather sweaty event. When I am rucking, one of the 4 Rules of Rucking is, #1 Always Look Cool. This is an idiom as in don’t let people see you sweat. If you are stressed, just stay cool, keep a level head and look the part. A good pair of aviators always helps to hide what your eyes can’t.

Then I open my garage fridge, because every Midwesterner has their old kitchen fridge in the garage, right? Grab a nice cold aluminum can out. And before I can put it in a thermal insulating housing, I see the condensation of the humidity forming on the aluminum. This makes me think of some of the electrical panels I encountered during my time in machine shops.

I once approached a vertical machining center whose spindle chiller, with a thermo-couple failure, had been cooling the spindle continuously during the summer months. This spindle looked like the ice-cold aluminum can I had sitting out on my workbench yesterday. Fully covered in condensate from the humidity in the air. Condensate collected on an aluminum can and leaving a ring of water on a workbench is one thing. Water running down a high-speed spindle and causing issues with a dry machining process is another. This also reminded me of a recent call where a new customer wanted help sizing a Cabinet Cooler System to replace an air-to-air heat exchanger that had failed. When walking through the information needed to size the panel, I reached the Internal Temp Desired field, and there was a pause. While I thought maybe they were checking their notes, they came back with 72°F. I wrote down the value on my notepad, then asked, “That’s oddly specific. Is there a piece of equipment that alarms out over 72°F that we are trying to protect?” The response I received was no. So I asked what the need was for this low set point.

I dug further with them, and it turned out that’s what they kept the engineers’ office set for in the summer, so they thought my question was odd and figured, if they are comfortable there and their computer on their desk operates well, then it must be a good temperature. This is not an incorrect statement. The control cabinet for the machine would operate just fine at 72°F; however, all the electronics that were in the panel were rated up to 104°F before they overheat, so it doesn’t quite make sense to extend the cooling capacity needed to reach that 72°F requested set point. Once we talked this over, we settled on the standard of 95°F for the internal set point with the understanding that by using a thermostatically controlled system, they could adjust it down lower if they really wanted to. In the end, we saved them some energy by sizing the Cabinet Cooler System to meet the demands of their industrial electronics, not what makes a person feel comfortable.

This isn’t always the case; occasionally, there is a panel that requires a low maximum temperature in order to keep a critical piece of equipment stable. This is why we ask the questions to validate any concerns with the data we are viewing as Application Engineers. This is also why we have built in a number of warnings/alerts on our Online Cabinet Cooler Sizing Calculator.

If you have a panel that needs to be cooled, the online calculator has fields for all the information we need. If you want to walk through the math behind the calculator and talk through the reasons we ask for the information that we do, you can either call, email, or even live chat with an Application Engineer, and we will gladly walk you through our process and the math to determine which Cabinet Cooler System is right for your needs.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS
National Business Development Manager

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Necessity Is The Mother of Invention

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

Necessity is the mother of invention, or something like that. My garage is riddled with “tools” that have come from necessity at any specific point in time.

Things like a socket that has been ground down around the outer wall to fit into a space that was too tight for anything else. Maybe it is a combination line wrench that has been torch-heated and bent to go around another hard line. Eventually, it will need to be reheated and bent back to near straight. I even have some special ground screwdrivers and punches that have been used on various projects. At the moment, I can’t remember whether one was for installing a retaining ring in a master cylinder on a brake system or for removing a key from a shaft. The unique purpose eventually fades from memory after you do it so many times.

The one that I have used most recently is a mason jar that has some fittings attached to the lid and has some tubing coiled up inside. If you have ever worked on car or motorcycle brakes with me, then there is a very good chance we have used this tool at some point.

This tool started as it was purchased, with a hand pump and a small fluid container. After starting at EXAIR and bleeding several motorcycle brake systems, I recognized the need for something easier and less back-and-forth than the hand pump. So I placed a small E-Vac onto the system instead of the hand pump. I blogged about this back in April 2010. That was one of my first blogs here at EXAIR as an Application and ever for that matter. After the addition of the E-Vac, and working on some larger systems, I realized the small container was not sufficient and needed to be emptied too frequently. I needed a chamber that would handle vacuum and not degrade with brake fluid exposure. I just happened to have been canning some tomatoes and saw an extra mason jar sitting there. A couple of fittings later and I now have a 1-qt capacity pneumatic brake bleeder system.

Fast-forward to last week, and I was using the same mason jar vacuum system to draw all the power steering fluid out of two vehicles and perform a fluid change on them. This system has been loaned out to many of my friends over the past decade and always comes back to sit on the shelf until it is needed again. I may even be using it this weekend to help with a new clutch install with a friend.

At EXAIR we have a fairly extensive listing of products available in stock configurations. However, we also love to talk about how we can modify them to suit special circumstances. Please let us know if you want to discuss how we can help you create a purpose-built system or tool to suit your needs.

    

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS
National Business Development Manager

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Comparing and Combining Sound Levels

Published on by Al WooffittLeave a comment

Sound levels are an important safety consideration in most industrial facilities. OSHA has guidelines on allowable noise levels and exposure, covered in OSHA Standard 29CFR – 1910.95 (a). Sound levels are measured in decibels, or dB. It makes sense that a higher decibel value means a louder sound (as illustrated in the graphic below). What is not intuitive is how multiple sound levels interact and combine, or how they compare to one another.

The first thing to understand about sound levels is that they aren’t measured on a linear scale. Instead, they’re measured on a logarithmic scale. This can really throw off our intuition. For instance, a sound at 20dB is actually 10 times stronger than one at 10dB, and a sound at 30dB is 100 times stronger than 10dB. If it were a linear scale, 20dB and 30dB would only be 2 and 3 times stronger than 10dB, similar to how mass works—like 20kg being double the mass of 10kg.

You can see why this is the case with the formula for calculating sound levels, which is as follows:

It’s important to note that the sound pressure levels calculated using this formula are unweighted. To really grasp how loud something will seem to us, we have to consider how our ears pick up various frequencies. This means that low and extremely high frequencies are given less weight than on the standard decibel scale. This adjusted measurement is referred to as dBA. You can check out some typical sounds and their dBA levels in the chart below:

Because of this logarithmic scale, combining two sounds can be pretty counter-intuitive too. Our Model 1100 Super Air Nozzle generates a sound level of 74 dBA, but when you place two of them side by side, the sound level jumps to 78 dBA (and not 148dBA). This is determined using the formula below:

The specifics of this calculation are explained in this blog here, but OHSA provides a quick and easy way to calculate, as shown in the table below:

To see if you need to tackle the noise levels in your facility, you should start by taking a baseline measurement of the different processes and devices that are making the noise. EXAIR’s Sound Level Meter, Model 9104, is here to help. It’s super user-friendly and gives you a digital readout of the sound level (no need to deal with logarithms!).

If you would like to discuss sound levels in your facility, or any of your other compressed air needs, give us a call!

Al Wooffitt
Application Engineer

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