Tag: air saving

EXAIR Calculators

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

I went to grade school in the 1970s and really developed a love of mathematics in the fifth grade (1976-1977), spurred on by a wonderful teacher that I actually still am in touch with today. 1977 was also the year that I got my first handheld calculator. It had an LCD display and would perform basic arithmetic, as long as the 9V battery lasted. If I recall, it set me back almost $10, which was what I earned in two Saturday afternoons of helping a neighbor split firewood (I hauled & stacked; he ran the log splitter).

Pretty soon, all the cool kids were getting them, and, while the teachers couldn’t stop us from doing math homework with them, they DID prohibit them in the classroom, and lectured us CONSTANTLY about the need to do – and show – our work on paper, because we were NEVER going to carry a calculator around in our pockets. The classroom calculator ban continued on through high school, but in Naval Nuclear Power School, and then college, the use of calculators was actually mandated…but only after we’d demonstrated proficiency in doing math on paper. That’s a concept I agree with wholeheartedly.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and it turns out, just about everybody DOES carry a calculator in their pockets…on the same device that has a built-in camera, video recorder, GPS…oh, and us old timers actually make phone calls on it too. You can also use that smartphone to access websites where you might find online calculators that aid in selecting that particular company’s products. As you might have guessed by now, EXAIR is one of those particular companies, and I’m writing this blog today to let you know about our Calculator Library. Depending on what you want to know, we have several that’ll do the math for you:

Air Savings Calculator: Use this one to determine the potential compressed air savings associated with replacing an existing compressed air blowing device with an efficient EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Product. There are two to choose from: one in USD, and one in Euros.

EFC Calculator: Not all blowing applications require continuous operation of the blowing device. EXAIR’s EFC Electronic Flow Control is a standalone system that’ll turn the compressed air flow on & off, as needed, so you don’t waste money on compressed air consumption when it’s not doing anything for you. This calculator will tell you how much you can save on compressed air costs, and your return on investment in the EFC. Like the Air Savings Calculator, we have a USD and a Euro version.

Cabinet Cooler System Calculator: Instead of air consumption & dollars (or Euros), our new Cabinet Cooler System Calculator is all about heat loads and cooling capacities. EXAIR has offered the ability to submit Cabinet Cooler Sizing Guide data for a long time – by fax (THAT’S how long it’s been), email, or straight through the website. For the Do-It-Yourselfers out there, we now have this feature for you to submit your data and get an immediate answer as to which Cabinet Cooler System has the cooling capacity to handle the heat load calculated from your data.

For the record, I’ve only chided my 5th grade teacher for her insistence that nobody would ever be carrying calculators around with them all day. It was on a Facebook post – where we were both using smartphones – and we had a good laugh about it. All’s well that ends well. But if you’ve got questions about EXAIR’s calculators, feel free to give me a call. We can even do the math the old-fashioned way if you prefer.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
Visit us on the Web
Follow me on Twitter
Like us on Facebook

EXAIR’s Calculator Library

Published on by bdwagesLeave a comment

If there is one thing you can always count on it’s a good calculator, and EXAIR offers you 3 — right on our website!!! The calculator library consists of an Air Savings Calculator, an EFC Calculator, and a Cabinet Cooler sizing calculator. All 3 of these add exceptional value and insight into our products. Let’s take a minute and look at each of these calculators in a little more detail.

The Air Saving Calculator allows you to compare a current product, to one of our products based upon overall cost. In order to make this effective for you, you will need to know the SCFM that your current solution is using. With that information, we can factor in the cost of our product and the SCFM consumption of this new solution, and give you an Air and Cost savings number. For example, if you are using a 1/4″ open pipe for blow off, you would be using @ 40 SCFM (not going to mention the OSHA violations – that’s for another blog). By placing one of our Super Air Nozzles on this open pipe, we will save you so much air (SCFM) that you can quickly see (above) that this one nozzle, can save you up to $1350 per year… One Nozzle!!!

The next calculator is the EFC calculator. An EFC is an Electronic Flow Control that can help you quickly automate your process. The EFC will allow you to use air only when it’s necessary and cut down on consumption. For example, if your conveyor has dead space between products, the EFC will shut the air flow off during the dead space. The calculator will tell you how much money you can save by installing the EFC. This will even tell you how long it will take to pay off the initial cost of the EFC unit. To use this calculator you will need the SCFM being consumed, the % of time that the product needs to be on, the purchase price of the EFC (this varies by size, call for details, or see on the link), and your cost of compressed air. We have $0.25 in this blank as a general standard, but if you know your actual, you will get a more concise answer. Your cost could be much higher, I’d be surprised if it is lower. The Example to the left shows the effects of a $1200 EFC that runs a product at 80 SCFM, and needs to be on 45% of the day. The EFC turns off the air the other 55% of the day when there is no reason to run the air. This pays for itself in 76 days, and adds $3960 to the bottom line each and every year.

The 3rd and final calculator that EXAIR offers online is the most used. It is our Cabinet Cooler System Calculator. Electrical cabinets get hot, and will overheat your electronics. Our Cabinet Coolers are the most efficient method to cool these cabinets, and eliminate electronic damage from overheating. There are no moving parts in these Cabinet Coolers, and the Vortex based system cools these with little to no maintenance. You simply need to supply these with clean, dry, compressed air. As you can imagine, these cabinets come in all sizes, and there are all sorts of various electronics that can be inside of these. We need the measurements and temperatures so that we can calculate the correct size Cabinet Cooler system for you. Our Cabinet Coolers have large size differences, from as little as 4 SCFM and 275 Btu/hr, up to 80 SCFM and 5600 Btu/hr, and we can go larger than this if necessary. The good thing about this calculator is that all of the information you need to enter is readily available to you as long as you have a a tape measure and a thermometer.

We do encourage everyone to take advantage of these on-line tools, however always remember that experienced application engineers like me, are here M-F 7AM-4PM EST to help you in any way possible.

Thank you for stopping by,

Brian Wages

Application Engineer

EXAIR Corporation
Visit us on the Web
Follow me on Twitter

Cover photo by Peggy_Marco licensed by Pixabay

What’s So Great About Air Entrainment?

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

Air entrainment is the phenomenon that occurs when air (or any gas) under pressure is released from a device in such a way that a low pressure is generated in the immediate area of the air (or gas) discharge.  Air (or gas) from the surrounding environment is then pulled (or entrained) into the discharged air stream, increasing its volumetric flow rate.  EXAIR Corporation has been engineering & manufacturing compressed air products to take maximum advantage of this phenomena since 1983…and we’ve gotten better & better at it over the past 36 years.

Obviously, the first thing that’s so great about air entrainment is…free air flow.  Every cubic foot that’s entrained means that’s a cubic foot that your compressor didn’t have to spend energy compressing.  Considering the EXAIR Super Air Knife’s entrainment ratio of 40:1, that makes for a VERY efficient use of your compressed air.

Another thing that’s so great about air entrainment is…it’s quiet.  As you can see from the graphic at the top of this blog, the Super Air Knife entrains air (the lighter, curved blue arrows) into the primary compressed air stream (the darker, straight blue arrows) from above and below.  The outer layers of the total developed flow are lower in velocity, and serve as a sound-attenuating boundary layer.  The sound level of a Super Air Knife (any length…here’s why) is only 69dBA.  That means if you’re talking with someone and a Super Air Knife is running right next to you, you can still use your “inside voice” and continue your conversation, unaffected by the sound of the air flow.

I always thought it would be helpful to have more than just a graphic with blue arrows to show the effect & magnitude of air entrainment.  A while back, I accidentally stumbled across a stunning visual depiction of just that, using a Super Air Knife.  I had the pleasure of talking with a caller about how effective a Super Air Knife might be in blowing light gauge paperboard pieces.  So I set one up in the EXAIR Demo Room, blowing straight upwards, and tossed paper plates into the air flow.  It worked just as expected, until one of the paper plates got a little closer to the Super Air Knife than I had planned:

As you can see, the tremendous amount of air flow being entrained…from both sides…was sufficient to pull in lightweight objects and ‘stick’ them to the surface that the entrained air was being drawn past.  While it doesn’t empirically prove the 40:1 ratio, it indisputably demonstrates that an awful lot of air is moving there.

If you’re looking for a quiet, efficient, and OSHA compliant solution for cleaning, blow off, drying, cooling…anything you need an even, consistent curtain of air flow for – look no further than the EXAIR Super Air Knife.  If you’d like to discuss a particular application and/or product selection, give me a call.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
EXAIR Corporation
Visit us on the Web
Follow me on Twitter
Like us on Facebook

Adjustable E-Vac Saves Coolant

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

Many EXAIR Corporation blogs could use this formula as the title:

[EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Product]  saves  [valuable commodity in customer’s facility]

Popular examples might be:

But how exactly does an Adjustable E-Vac Vacuum Generator save coolant?  Isn’t that what the Chip Trapper Systems do?  (It is, and that’s been covered extensively here, here, and-my personal favorite-here.)

Our E-Vac Vacuum Generators are probably most commonly used in pick-and-place applications, in conjunction with our Vacuum Cups.

From a lightweight manual operation to an automated system with large or heavy objects, the EXAIR E-Vac Vacuum Generators can solve the application.

The Adjustable E-Vacs, however, have a unique feature – a relatively large throat diameter – that makes them well suited for suctioning up liquids.  And I recently had the pleasure of helping a caller with just such an application.  They make machinery for the automotive industry, and in one particular operation, coolant gets left behind in ‘pockets’ of a particularly unwieldy piece.  They can drain most of it at the machine, but what gets left behind in these pockets makes a real mess as it goes to the next fabrication point, and, although it’s a small amount in each pocket, it adds up to a finite amount of wasted coolant.  It’s not practical to use an electric shop vacuum, but an operator could easily use a handheld device to suck up these little puddles.

Enter the Adjustable E-Vac…with the wide throat diameter I mentioned above and compact design, they were able to install a short suction hose (via a threaded push-in connector) to the vacuum port, and a little longer discharge hose to the exhaust port, and they have a quick and easy, portable, maneuverable coolant transfer system.  Here’s a short video I made in the Demo Room, once upon a time, showing how it works:

Saving air.  Saving coolant.  Saving money and time, one compressed air application at a time.  If you have one you’d like to discuss, give me a call.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
EXAIR Corporation
Visit us on the Web
Follow me on Twitter
Like us on Facebook