Tag: atomized

Big Nozzle, Big Award…Again!

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

The year was 2016, and it was quite a time for sports fans:

  • Team USA dominated at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Swimmer Michael Phelps won five Gold Medals, and gymnast Simone Biles won a Gold Medal on her own, and another for the team event, contributing to the 46 total Gold Medals won by United States Olympians.
  • The Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians took the World Series to all seven games…and extra innings in Game Seven. That makes it hard to disparage either team, but the Cubs prevailed, winning the Fall Classic for the first time in 108 years.
  • World Series heartbreak notwithstanding, Cleveland sports fans were pretty happy a few months earlier when the Cavaliers cinched the NBA Championship in seven games, defeating the heavily favored Golden State Warriors…who beat the Cavs in both of their regular season games that year.

Another big winner (non-sports) that year was EXAIR Corporation’s Model EF5010SS External Mix Narrow Angle Flat Fan Pattern 1/2 NPT Atomizing Spray Nozzle…it won Plant Engineering’s Product of the Year Bronze Medal Award in the Fluid Handling category. Yes, there’s a Compressed Air category, and our products have won a TON of those too…as well as some other categories:

  • Material Handling (Line Vacs)
  • Maintenance Products (Super Air Nozzles)
  • Environmental Health (High Lift Reversible Drum Vac)
  • Automation & Controls (EFC Electronic Flow Control)
Just a few of our past Product of the Year award winners in categories other than “Compressed Air”.

Anyway, now it’s 2021, and the No-Drip version of that Atomizing Spray Nozzle – Model EF6010SS – has won Plant Engineering’s GOLD Medal Award in the Fluid Handling category. Model EF6010SS offers the same performance as the EF5010SS:

  • Liquid flow rates from 141 to 303 gallons per hour (tested with water)
  • Flat fan spray dimensions from 15″ wide (6″ from target) to 25″ wide (15″ from target)
  • Atomized spray at a distance of up to 35 feet away

And, of course, the No-Drip feature means you can instantly stop liquid flow by shutting off the compressed air supply, up to 180 cycles a minute, if needed. This is a great feature to have to cut down on the cost – and the MESS – associated with overspraying.

Our comprehensive line of Atomizing Spray Nozzles has options for most any liquid that can be sprayed, with a wide range of flow rates and pattern size/shapes. The 1/2 NPT External Mix Narrow Angle Flat Fan model is ideally suited for liquids with higher viscosities where a higher flow rate/thicker coating is needed, as opposed to a humidification or misting application, where a smaller Atomizing Spray Nozzle might be specified. Some current, successfully reported, applications include:

  • Snack food provider – applying flavoring to bulk snack materials.
  • Commercial bakery – spraying cooking oil onto pans used in a conveyor oven.
  • Sporting goods manufacturer – applying adhesive to the tops of skateboard decks to glue the grip tape on.

If you’d like to discuss a particular liquid spraying application, I’d love to help…give me a call.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
EXAIR Corporation
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Benefits of Atomized Liquid Nozzles vs. Liquid Nozzles

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

There are a great many applications that require a spray (as opposed to a stream) of liquid. Certain droplet sizes, and flow rates, are beneficial for certain applications. For example, if you’re fighting a fire, you want as high of a flow rate as possible – the more water you douse the fire with, the quicker it goes out.  You also want a fairly large droplet size, since a mist would tend to evaporate instead of extinguishing the flames.

Pressure washers also benefit from higher (though not near as high as fire hose) flow rates, and droplet sizes.  You want an appreciable flow rate, because that means high velocity, and good sized droplets combine that velocity with their relative mass to “blast” away dirt and detritus from the surface.

Medicine delivery devices, like asthma inhalers, are designed to produce mid-sized droplets, but pretty low (and controlled) flows.  The droplets need to be small enough to efficiently spread the medicine through the breathing passages, but large enough to where they won’t evaporate before they ‘plant’ on the nasal & bronchial membranes to get absorbed.

These are examples of “liquid-only” nozzles…no other media or means of force are used to effect the spraying action.  Most of the time, the droplet sizes in these applications are measured in hundreds of microns, which “liquid-only” nozzles are ideally suited to generate.  Other applications, however, call for much smaller droplet sizes…such as those only attainable through atomization.

EXAIR Atomizing Spray Nozzles use compressed air to create a fine mist of liquid, with droplet sizes as low as 22 microns.

A typical “liquid-only” nozzle is capable of producing droplet sizes of 300-4,000 microns. Atomizing Nozzles’ droplet sizes are consistently under 100 microns, and can be as small as 20 microns!

Small droplet size is key to cost effectiveness in many applications:

  • Think about expensive coatings…the smaller the droplet size, the better and more even the coverage, and the less you have to spray (and pay) out.
  • Or humidification…smaller droplet size means more stays airborne, for longer, and in a larger space.
  • Petroleum based lubricants, by their nature, only require a thin layer for best results.  Smaller droplets make as even and thin of a layer as possible.
  • Dust control is much more effective with smaller droplet sizes, since the longer the mist lingers in the air, the more dust particles the individual droplets will adhere to…and then drop with them to the surface.  This also prevents getting the surface of the material any wetter than it has to be.
142 distinct models. 8 different patterns. Liquid flow rates from 0.1 to 303 gallons per hour. If you’ve got a spraying application, EXAIR has an Atomizing Nozzle for you!

If you’d like to discuss a liquid spraying application, I’d love to hear from you.  Call me.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
EXAIR Corporation
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