That’s right everyone, it’s Friday. I’m blogging again which means everything went according to plan on Monday and Tuesday at Mid Ohio. Myself and everyone I went with all stayed shiny side up so we consider it a complete success. Even though it’s been a short week for me here at EXAIR there hasn’t been a lack of applications coming across my desk. As Lee mentioned in his blog yesterday a good number of them are Cabinet Cooler inquiries seeing as how much of the US is well into the Summer temps now. One of the applications that came across stood out though.
There was a customer who started out the conversation with, “I’m not a compressed air person. I normally work with electricity.” He was given the task of trying to figure out how to cool down a part as it exits a drying oven. The parts were fairly flat and being conveyed on an overhead conveyor system. They slowing down production of the parts because he couldn’t package the parts after they exited the drying oven because the heat from the part was not only too much for the operators to handle but it was also too hot for the packaging. When the part would go in too hot the packaging would slightly mar the surface finish of the coated part. This meant the customer was placing parts on drying racks and letting them cool which slows down the production line.
The customer initially wanted to cool down the part using a Vortex Tube to do so. After a brief discussion I found out that the ambient environment of the cooling area was considerably cooler than the part and the parts were around 11″ long. This means by using a 12″ Super Air Knife we can entrain a large volume of free ambient air and move the air over the surface of the part to strip the heat away from the part. This will get the parts down to near ambient conditions so the operators can place them straight into their packaging instead of holding up the line or placing them on a cooling rack.
The customer initially contacted us looking for something that puts out cold air, he hadn’t thought about just using a large volume of cool, free ambient air to move over the part and get the same performance. After a little talking he decided to test out two 12″ Super Air Knives. He knows if they don’t work as predicted then they can simply let us know and send them back within 30 days. A similar application is shown below.
The customer received the units yesterday and this morning I had a message from the customer saying that the knives are working wonderfully and he is not using any cooling racks, they were even able to speed up the production line.
This made my week go amazing; it started out with two days of a beautiful race track, going faster than I ever have and stepping up to the next class of racing, then finishing it out with a success story from a customer who can now relax on the weekend.
Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF
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