Tag: air operated vacuum

The Power of Precision: Why EXAIR’s Adjustable E-Vac is a Game Changer

Published on by Al WooffittLeave a comment

When designing a vacuum system, the “one-size-fits-all” approach rarely works. EXAIR offers two primary types of single-stage vacuum generators: the In-Line E-Vac and the Adjustable E-Vac. While both use a venturi design to create instantaneous vacuum without moving parts, choosing between them depends on how much control and “forgiveness” your application requires.

The primary difference lies in versatility and internal geometry. In-Line E-Vacs are compact, cylindrical units designed for specific, unchanging tasks.

  • Variants: They come in “High Vacuum” models for non-porous materials (like glass or steel) and “Low Vacuum” models for porous materials (like cardboard).
  • Limitation: Once you choose a model, its performance is fixed.

Adjustable E-Vacs allow you to “dial in” the exact vacuum level and flow rate needed.

  • Versatility: By loosening a locknut and turning the exhaust, you can shift the unit’s performance to handle different weights or surface porosities.
  • Durability: They feature a much larger throat diameter, which allows them to pass small solids, dust, and even liquids without clogging.

The Choice: Why Go Adjustable?

The Adjustable E-Vac is the superior choice when your production line handles either variety, or potentially contains contamination. For facilities that use a robotic arm to pick and place various items from a conveyor depending on the job, you would potentially need more than one style of In-Line E-Vac. For example, if one job requires lifting heavy, non-porous plastic containers, you would need a high-vacuum, low-flow unit; whereas if the next job is handling lightweight, porous cardboard boxes, this would require a low-vaccum, high-flow unit.

By choosing the Adjustable E-Vac, you can tune for porosity: Increase the vacuum flow with a quick adjustment to overcome the “leakage” inherent in cardboard. In addition to this, if the surface is less than pristine, the larger throat diameter will have no trouble passing the dirt and debris.

If you’re ready to integrate these tools, several kits and individual units are available:

  • EXAIR Adjustable E-Vac Vacuum Generator 840008: A compact 8 SCFM model, ideal for smaller pick-and-place tasks.
  • EXAIR Adjustable E-Vac Vacuum Generator 840015: A mid-range 15 SCFM unit for higher flow requirements.
  • EXAIR E-Vac Adjustable Vacuum Generator Deluxe Kit 842030: A complete solution including the pump, an assortment of vacuum cups, tubing, a filter separator, and a pressure regulator.
  • EXAIR E-Vac Deluxe Kit 842060M: A high-capacity 62.7 SCFM kit featuring a straight-through muffler, perfect for environments with heavy particulate.

If you would like to find out more, give us a call!

Al Wooffitt
Application Engineer

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Porous vs. Non-porous Material Selection

Published on by Al WooffittLeave a comment

EXAIR’s E-Vacs offer an excellent solution for a variety of applications such as pick and place, chucking, surface mounting, lifting, and vacuum forming.
When it comes to choosing the right model for your needs, there are a few key factors to keep in mind. While picking the correct vacuum cup size is crucial, and understanding the size and weight of the part is essential, one of the most important aspects is assessing the type of material you’re dealing with. In particular, is the material porous or non-porous?

Porous materials, as the name implies, contain numerous (very small) holes. This enables air to pass through when attempting to create a vacuum. It can be tricky when using an E-Vac. To tackle this issue, a high vacuum flow is necessary. In contrast, non-porous materials do not permit air to flow through, allowing for a higher vacuum level to be reached with a lower vacuum flow. If you’re aware of which category your material belongs to, we can choose the right E-Vac.

If you’re dealing with porous materials like paper, cardboard, or certain fabrics, we suggest using one of our vacuum generators that creates a low vacuum level along with a high vacuum flow. With vacuum levels reaching up to 21″ Hg and flows up to 18.5 SCFM, this type of E-vac generates more vacuum flow to tackle porosity and leakage. Plus, they can also lift or hold fragile materials, helping to avoid any warping or distortion of the surface from too much vacuum.

Cardboard – Photo by OpenClipart Vectors and licensed by Pixabay
Glass – Photo by dflamini and licensed by Pixabay

On the other hand, if your material is non-porous, such as glass, steel sheet, or plastic, you’ll need a generator that can create a high vacuum level with a lower vacuum flow. EXAIR’s non-porous high vacuum units can reach vacuum levels of up to 27″ Hg and vacuum flows of up to 15.8 SCFM. These vacuum generators provide the best holding capacity for heavy materials. You can find sizes that require as little as 2.3 SCFM of compressed air at 80 PSIG, and up to 30.8 SCFM for the largest and heaviest materials.

Once you’ve determined which vacuum generator is most suitable for your material, you will then need to select between our E-Vac accessories to complete your system. We offer different sizes and styles of vacuum cups, as well as mufflers (both standard and straight-through style). We also have auto-drain filters to ensure the compressed air supply is clean and moisture free. This will make your E-Vac system virtually maintenance free.

If you would like to talk to an Application Engineer to help you determine the best option for your application, give me a call!

Al Wooffitt
Application Engineer

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Accessories for Your Compressed Air Products

Published on by Al WooffittLeave a comment

Here at EXAIR we are very proud of our Intelligent Compressed Air Products. We have spent a lot of time discussing their many benefits, including their efficiency, the fact that many have no moving parts, little to no maintenance, meeting or exceeding OSHA safety standards for noise or dead end pressure. One thing we don’t talk as much about is the accessories that go along with and complement our products. Several of these accessory items are the reason why our compressed air products can boast about having little to no maintenance, or reduced noise levels. In this blog I want to cover some of these unsung heroes.

From left to right, a few value-added accessories for your Vortex Tube: Hot Muffler, Cold Muffler, Automatic Drain Filter Separator, Oil Removal Filter, and Solenoid Valve/Thermostat Kit.

Some of the most popular accessories we offer are our compressed air Filters and Regulators. We suggest using these with all our products (or even with ones that aren’t ours).

The Filter Separator is designed to remove moisture, dirt, and rust from your compressed air system. The 5-micron filter element ensures that contaminants don’t clog or harm your compressed air equipment.

An Oil Removal Filter (which should always be installed after our Filter Separator) provides even more precise filtration by getting rid of oil and solid particles with a 0.03-micron element.

Our Pressure Regulators let you choose the operating pressure. At EXAIR, we always advise running at the lowest pressure necessary to complete the task. Pressure Regulators help you achieve that, reducing unnecessary air usage and fine-tuning the performance of EXAIR products for your specific application.

We have some accessories designed specifically for certain products. For our Line Vacs, there’s the Line Vac Hose. You can also find Thermostats and Solenoid Valves that work great with our Cabinet Coolers, and if you’re using Vortex Tubes, we suggest checking out our Mufflers.

When it comes to our Air Knives, we offer a variety of fantastic options:

If you’re looking for a simple and dependable way to mount your Air Knife, our Universal Air Knife Mounting System is just what you need.

If your project needs something longer than our stock Air Knives, or if you want to manage different sections of the air flow separately, our Coupling Bracket Kits are ideal.

And if you want to simplify the plumbing for your Air Knife, don’t miss our Air Knife Plumbing Kits. They’re suitable for all Air Knives that are longer than 24 inches.

If you’re looking for plumbing options, we’ve got a range of compressed air hoses and fittings that will simplify things for you.

Our Coiled Hoses work great with our Safety Air Guns, giving you more freedom of movement while you work.

Our Compressed Air Hoses are often used alongside our Industrial Housekeeping products to provide the necessary reach for the drum and dolly.

Finally, if you’re looking for a way to mount or position your Air Nozzles, check out our Magnetic Bases, Stay Set Hoses, and Swivel Fittings that can help create a complete setup.

No matter what your application requires or the product you need, we’ve got a variety of complementary accessory products that will simplify installation and adjustments. If you have any questions about these or any other EXAIR products, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Al Wooffitt
Application Engineer

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Giovanni Battista Venturi: A Real Renaissance Man

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) was the quintessential Renaissance Man: artist, philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and an inventor ahead of his time. From the 15th to 18th Centuries, though, he was primarily known for his paintings. Then, in 1797, Giovanni Battista Venturi published his “Essai sur les ouvrages physico-mathématiques de Léonard de Vinci”, which brought to light Da Vinci’s immense volume of work in the scientific fields of fluid dynamics and aerodynamics. Curiously, he was only able to do this because of the access he gained to notebooks that had been looted by Napoleon’s troops during their occupation of Milan, Italy, and brought back to France.

To conclude that Venturi was just a writer, though, would be as bad as regrettable as calling Da Vinci just a painter. Born into a rich family in northern Italy, he was a star pupil at the Jesuit seminary in his hometown of Bibbiano. He was such a good student that in 1756 – at the age of ten – he started attending the seminary in Reggio Emilia, studying logic, metaphysics, and mathematics.

As a teenager, he enrolled in the university there, studying physics and biology before returning to the seminary, where he was ordained as a priest in 1769. He taught logic at the seminary for five years, and then went on to “the big city” of Modena to teach philosophy and geometry at the university there. He was 28 when he started there, and by age 30 he was teaching physics as well.

In addition to his service in the priesthood and at the university, he also held the office of official state engineer, mathematician, and auditor, appointed by the Duke of Modena. This meant he was responsible for the construction of bridges, draining of marsh land, and implementing regulations for the building of dams. And, in his spare time, it seems he also completed the town of Modena’s historical memoirs, a task that had been started by the town historian, but had remained dormant since his passing, some 56 years earlier.

All of this would have earned Venturi local, probably regional, and perhaps even national fame…especially the part about making Leonardo Da Vinci famous for more than just his art. But what really sealed his place in the annals of history was his discovery of a particular fluidic effect: namely, that a reduction in fluid pressure results when a fluid flows from one section of a pipe into a narrower section.

The Venturi effect, named after the real Renaissance man who discovered it, Giovanni Battista Venturi who published a paper on it in 1794.

Despite its discovery in the late 18th Century, it was not actually practically applied for almost 100 years, when an American hydraulic engineer named Clemens Herschel patented a water flow meter, in 1889. He named it the Venturi Meter, and they became prolific in water works around the turn of the century. Coincidentally, Mr. Herschel had a background in bridge building too.

Today, there are numerous machines that use the Venturi effect: fluid moving educator pumps, gas inspirators in grills, stoves, & Bunsen burners, paint atomizers, wine aerators, locomotive engine steam injectors, sandblasting nozzles, scuba diving regulators…and vacuum generators.

That last one is where EXAIR gets involved. We incorporate Venturis into our E-Vac Vacuum Generators, which are capable of vacuum levels up to 27″Hg. They’re used for material handling, pick & place systems, bag/package opening, label placement, vacuum forming, and workholding, just to name a few.

The wide throat diameter of the Adjustable E-Vac makes it suitable for applications where small amounts of particulate and/or liquid may be drawn through.

They’re also used in our Reversible Drum Vac and EasySwitch Wet-Dry Vac Systems. These are just two selections from our extensive line of compressed air operated Industrial Housekeeping Products.

EXAIR Reversible Drum Vacs (left) can fill a 55 gallon drum with water in 90 seconds, using a powerful Venturi. Our Chip Trapper Systems (middle) incorporate a Reversible Drum Vac to vacuum coolant from machine tool sumps for filtration. The EasySwitch Wet-Dry Vac uses a Venturi as well for dry and liquid cleanup applications.

Giovanni Battista Venturi retired in 1813, but continued writing a number of scientific and literary works, including a collection of Galileo’s manuscripts & letters. He died in 1822, at the age of 75.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
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