Tag: baseball

Traditions & Opening Day

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

I’m sure wherever you live, the closest city that has a major league baseball team has a big to-do list centered around their opening day. Here in Cincinnati, it is very close to a holiday tradition for locals. We have friends who take off work and still take their teenage kids to the parade and take in all the festivities as part of an annual tradition. We can’t see the parade from our building in the Northeast corner of Cincinnati, and we don’t close because we pride ourselves on delivering shipments on time and when a customer needs, that speaks to the traditions that we honor.

Whenever you call in during business hours of 0700 – 1600 ET, you will be greeted by a real human, not some automated voice attendant that you have to guess which button to push or what to say to get to a real human. On top of that, we have an entire team of Application Engineers who are all trained across all of our product lines and will help to determine the best solutions for you and your team. We also pride ourselves on the ability to ship stock products on the same day for orders received by 2 PM ET. To top that off, we honor a 30-day guarantee on stock products shipped within the US and Canada.

This means if the product you receive doesn’t meet your expectations, our team will help you determine how to get it to exceed the need and if it cannot, then we will also walk you through the return process. This is on top of our 5-year built-to-last warranty on compressed air products ensuring their quality from material and workmanship defects. (1-year warranty for electronic components)

If you want to talk to a real person and start a relationship with a company that is going to help you get to the solutions you need in order to improve your process, contact an Application Engineer today!

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Opening Day in Cincinnati Means Summer is Fast Approaching!

Published on by Tyler DanielLeave a comment

The first day of spring “officially” started on March 20th this year. I place the word officially in quotations as I don’t recognize spring until I can come home from work, flip on the TV and watch a Cincinnati Reds game. THAT is when spring starts in my mind, yesterday was that day. If you’re from Cincinnati, I don’t need to tell you how important Opening Day is here. As home to the first professional Major League Baseball team, we take great pride in our Cincinnati Reds here. Despite the recent spat of losing seasons…. So much so that Red’s Opening Day has become a de facto holiday of sorts. In fact, many schools will even recognize an excused absence for students that take the day off to go down for the game and festivities prior to the first pitch. There’s even a parade!!

reds great american
view of GABP from center field

With spring upon us, that means summer is right around the corner. While this is an exciting event for most of us, your maintenance manager may beg to differ. Increased temperatures lead to heat related problems in your electrical panels. With summer coming along before you know it, the time is now to get a solution in place before it becomes an issue.

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EXAIR’s Cabinet Cooler Systems were designed specifically to rectify these issues within your facility. Utilizing Vortex Tube technology, the Cabinet Cooler produces cold air from an ordinary supply of compressed air. This cold air keeps the enclosure free of debris and moisture and is easily installed in minutes through a standard electrical knockout. Here is a short video that shows just how simple it really is. The Cabinet Cooler Systems are available with Nema 12 (IP54) ratings and are also available in Aluminum, 303 Stainless Steel, and 316 Stainless Steel construction for Nema 4/4X (IP66) rated enclosures. For systems that are not able to be mounted on top of the cabinet, we also have Side Mount Kits available in Aluminum, 303 Stainless, and 316 Stainless. This year, EXAIR also introduced a new line of Hazardous Location Cabinet Coolers for use in classified areas.

These systems are available with cooling capacities of anywhere from 275-5,600 Btu/hr. To make things much easier for you, we offer a Cabinet Cooler Sizing Guide that will allow us to recommend the most suitable model for your cabinet. With a few quick measurements, we’ll be able to determine the exact heat load that we’ll need to dissipate and offer you a quick and easy solution. If you experienced heat related issues on electrical panels last year, contact an Application Engineer today and we’ll see to it that this summer your cabinets remain cool!

Tyler Daniel
Application Engineer
E-mail: TylerDaniel@EXAIR.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_TD

 

Great American Ballpark image courtesy of ChipMahaney via Creative Commons License

The Bernoulli Principle

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

What do baseball, airplanes, and your favorite singer have in common? If you guessed that it has something to do with the title of this blog, dear reader, you are correct.  We’ll unpack all that, but first, let’s talk about this Bernoulli guy:

Jacob Bernoulli was a prominent mathematician in the late 17th century.  We can blame calculus on him to some degree; he worked closely with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who (despite vicious accusations of plagiarism from Isaac Newton) appears to have developed the same mathematical methods independently from the more famous Newton.  He also developed the mathematical constant e (base of the natural logarithm) and a law of large numbers which was foundational to the field of statistics, especially probability theory.  But he’s not the Bernoulli we’re talking about.

Johann Bernoulli was Jacob’s younger brother.  He shared his brother’s passion for the advancement of calculus, and was among the first to demonstrate practical applications in various fields.  So for engineers especially, he can share the blame for calculus with his brother.  But he’s not the Bernoulli we’re talking about either.

Johann’s son, Daniel, clearly got his father’s math smarts as well as his enthusiasm for practical applications, especially in the field of fluid mechanics.  His kinetic theory of gases is widely known as the textbook (literally) explanation of Boyle’s law.  And the principle that bears his name (yes, THIS is the Bernoulli we’re talking about) is central to our understanding of curveballs, airplane wings, and vocal range.

Bernoulli’s Principle states that an increase in the speed of a fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure (e.g., the fluid’s potential energy.)

  • In baseball, pitchers love it, and batters hate it.  When the ball is thrown, friction (mainly from the particular stitched pattern of a baseball) causes a thin layer of air to surround the ball, and the spin that a skilled pitcher puts on it creates higher air pressure on one side and lower air pressure on the other.  According to Bernoulli, that increases the air speed on the lower pressure side, and the baseball moves in that direction.  Since a well-thrown curveball’s axis of rotation is parallel to the ground, that means the ball drops as it approaches the plate, leaving the batter swinging above it, or awkwardly trying to “dig it out” of the plate.
  • The particular shape of an airplane wing (flat on the bottom, curved on the top) means that when the wing (along with the rest of the plane) is in motion, the air travelling over the curved top has to move faster than the air moving under the flat bottom.  This means the air pressure is lower on top, allowing the wing (again, along with the rest of the plane) to rise.
  • The anatomy inside your neck that facilitates speech is often called a voice box or vocal chords.  It’s actually a set of folds of tissue that vibrate and make sound when air (being expelled by the lungs when your diaphragm contracts) passes through.  When you sing different notes, you’re actually manipulating the area of air passage.  If you narrow that area, the air speed increases, making the pressure drop, skewing the shape of those folds so that they vibrate at a higher frequency, creating the high notes.  Opening up that area lowers the air speed, and the resultant increase in pressure lowers the vocal folds’ vibration frequency, making the low notes.
  • Bonus (because I work for EXAIR) Bernoulli’s Principle application: many EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Products are engineered to take advantage of this phenomenon to optimize efficiency:

The high speed of the air exiting the (left to right) the Air Wipe, Super Air Knife, Super Air Nozzle, and Air Amplifier creates a low pressure (just like Daniel Bernoulli said) that causes entrainment of an enormous amount of air from the surrounding environment.  This maximizes flow while minimizing consumption of your compressed air.

If you’d like to discuss Bernoulli, baseball, singing, or a potential compressed air application, give me a call.  If you want to talk airplane stuff, perhaps one of the other Application Engineers can help…I don’t really like to fly, but that’s a subject for another blog.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
EXAIR Corporation
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Think You’re Too Busy? Think Again.

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

The first half of Knothole Baseball season is drawing to a close this weekend.  This means that teams are in a mad scramble to make up all the rained out games that are par for the course, when you schedule springtime outdoor events in the more temperate climate regions of the American Midwest.  If the weather holds, that means eight games in six days, between the two baseball players that live in my house.  Now, I LIKE baseball, so, when their mother pointed this out to me with a dire look of frustration in her eyes, I thought it best to hide my excitement…lest I incur her wrath, along with Mother Nature and a couple of coaches.  By the way,Todd & Ryan: you should know it’s nothing personal, and she thinks the world of both of you.

So, we’re busy right now.  I mean, do the math: Eight games in six days means we’re unlikely to both be able to attend them all.  I’m going to try, of course…because of the divisions they play in and the layout of our local ballpark, they very likely could be playing on adjacent fields Saturday afternoon.  That’s MY kind of double-header!

I know we’re not the only ones who are busy right now either, personally or professionally.  Of course, professionally, busy-ness is kind of the goal, right?  That’s why it’s important to be as efficient as possible.  I had the pleasure of discussing an application with the operator of a fabrication shop this morning: After drilling & tapping a series of blind holes in a part, it gets washed & rinsed, and then blown off to remove the residual rinse water.  Problem is, it’s time consuming to blow out a couple dozen irregularly spaced holes on a couple hundred parts, each and every day, by hand.  And frankly, the tedium associated with the process means that holes are likely going to be missed, and even the ones that get blown out might not get 100% dry.

Their idea is to use a Super Air Knife to blow a high velocity “curtain” of air over the entire area where the holes are located…their maximum spacing is only about 8” from side to side, and they thought a 12” wide air flow pattern would be ideal, since they might have an inch or so “play” in the way the parts will pass through.  I recommended our Model 110212 12” Aluminum Super Air Knife Kit.

Like I said, though, they’re busy right now, so they don’t want to throw a bunch of time and labor at coming up with a way to install and test equipment that they have no experience with.  That’s where the total engineering of our Intelligent Compressed Air Products comes in:

Our Super Air Knives are designed to be the most efficient and quietest in the industry…we back that up with our Efficiency Lab (where your existing products can be tested by our experts, using our precision calibrated instrumentation) and our 30 Day Unconditional Guarantee (where you can see for yourself, in real time, how EXAIR’s Intelligent Compressed Air Products are better, quieter, and safer than what you’re using right now.)  Not only that, but our Engineering and Production folks have combined their knowledge and resources to also make them easy to install and operate:  They’re compact and lightweight.  They have multiple ports to plumb compressed air to, and tapped holes running their entire length to use for easy mounting.  We’ve got Universal Air Knife Mounting Systems that require only one hole to secure a ½”-13 bolt, and installation is done…you can position and reposition it all via two thumbscrews.  Longer length Super Air Knives are available with Plumbing Kits Installed, so your compressed air supply lines are simplified.  And we keep it all in stock, so you can try it out, right now.

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I won’t lie to you…blowing water out of blind holes is a tough application.  But they already know that.  After our conversation this morning, they also know how “low impact” (their words) a trial of the Super Air Knife will be.  I thought you should know too.

Do you have something in mind for a compressed air application that you don’t think you have time for?  Give us a call – you might be pleasantly surprised.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
(513)671-3322 local
(800)923-9247 toll free
(513)671-3363 fax
Web: www.exair.com
Twitter: twitter.com/exair_rb
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