Tag: Dave Woerner

How can you protect people that don’t protect themselves?

Published on by Dave WoernerLeave a comment

My sister-in-law and my nephews are traveling from Columbus to Cincinnati for a visit this weekend. My nephews are 18 months and 3 years old, and they will find any sharp, fragile, or flammable object within walking, crawling or climbing distance. Of course they don’t consider these things dangerous. All they see are fun new toys. Yesterday, I battened down the hatches for the nephew hurricane that will be barreling down Interstate 71 this weekend, and there were more dangerous or scary items in the house that the nephews will want to use than I could hide.

At EXAIR, we strive to provide products that intelligently use compressed air, but everyday we have customers who are using compressed air in unsafe manner. We try to educate many of our customers and the industry as whole of the dangers and that can be associated with compressed air. The chief concern is that compressed air may cause an embolism by forcing air into the bloodstream through a break in the skin or body opening. Because of this risk, OSHA has laid down several rules for using compressed air for cleaning purposes inside the work place. To quote the OSHA Instruction STD 1-13.1, “The requirements for dynamic flow are such that in the case when dead ending occurs a static pressure at the main orifice shall not exceed 30 psi. This requirement is necessary in order to prevent a back pressure buildup in case the nozzle is obstructed or dead ended.

An open pipe used for cleaning violates this rule. Yet everyday I speak to a customer who are using open pipes to remove chips, dust or water from parts. If a employees hand is trapped against the open tube, serious injury will result. EXAIR’s Super Air Nozzles are designed with multiple openings and fins to protect those openings, so that air always has a path to escape.

 

Nozzle Lineup

 

The other safety concern with an open pipe is the noise level.  Open pipes can produce noise levels over 100 dBA which violates OSHA’s standard for maximum Allowable Noise Exposure for even 2 hours per day.  EXAIR Super Air Nozzles will reduce noise levels to create a safer more productive work environment.

Dave Woerner
Application Engineer
Davewoerner@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_DW

 

Cleaning Honeycomb with a Super Ion Air Knife

Published on by Dave WoernerLeave a comment

This week I worked with a gentleman, who was having a problem cleaning a honeycomb web after a sawing operation. The honeycomb was a paper based material, and the sawing operation would create a large amount of dust. This dust filled his honeycomb, which made the product appear inconsistent to his customer on incoming inspections. This was leading to the customer questioning the quality of the product.

honeycomb

His process featured a blower that was incredibly noisy and still left some material on the product.  During the winter, the problem was further exasperated by the dry air, which led to the dust being statically charged and clinging to the honeycomb even more.  In spite of his quality and production issues, the customer was looking to expand his production to meet demand. The blower he was using had been custom-made for his machine, so he was open to any ideas. Also, the blower had no way of removing static electricity from the material.

I recommended he use an 84″ Super Ion Air Knife to clean his 80″ honeycomb web. The customer mounted the air knife perpendicular to the surface of the honeycomb 4″ away from the surface. One of my concerns with the operation was creating even flow. To do this on a long span, I recommended he use have the plumbing kit installed at EXAIR, which allows the air knife to create an even flow along the length of the knife y preventing any restrictions which may occur from poorly sized inlet fittings, hose or tube.  The Super Ion Air Knife cleaned the honey comb with ease, while maintaining a quiet 69 dBA, and without the expensive maintenance required by the blower.

PlumbingKit-bg

Dave Woerner
Application Engineer
Davewoerner@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_DW

Who You Gonna Call?

Published on by Dave WoernerLeave a comment

This week the world lost a great writer, actor, and comedian with the death of Harold Ramis. Ramis is famous on screen for playing Dr. Egon Spengler in the movie Ghostbusters. What he wrote surprises me even more. Looking through Ramis’s IMDB page, I find most movies that I loved as a kid or that my dad quoted to me on a regular basis had Ramis’s name as a writer. Just to recap for the uninitiated in the cult of Ramis, his writing credits include Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, and Analyze This. He also directed Caddyshack, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Multipilicity, Bedazzled, and Year One. He also has a severely overlooked scene in Knocked Up as the grandfather to be. Talking to my wife I discovered, that she may or may not have seen the entire Ghostbusters movie, so now we have our big weekend plans.  I tried to get her to watch already, but she seemed distracted. I will just try again this weekend.  I’m thinking a Ramis marathon is in order.  I’m thinking CaddyShack, Ghostbusters, Ghostbuster 2 and Groundhog Day.

ghostbusters

The closest thing to a family rated movie in the list is Ghostbusters, though as I was reminded by my colleagues there are some off color jokes. Maybe it is best to find it on TV, if you are going to watch with the kids. One of my favorite scenes is when the hotel manager, played by Michael Ensign, has to call the Ghostbusters as a last resort. The hotel is a very ritzy joint, where problems like physics, logistics and ghosts should obviously be no problem for the immense amount of money it costs to rent out their grand ballroom. It is not in the movie, but you could imagine the Michael Ensign character has already called an exterminator, a priest, and the police.  None of these people have had any luck removing the green slimy ghost from the hotel. Therefore, on the night of a great party for an important guest, he has to stoop to calling the Ghostbusters.  Hilarity ensues.

After this scene, we are reintroduced to the great Ray Parker Jr.’s great Ghostbusters theme song known in my house as ““Who You Gonna Call?” Well if you have an industrial compressed air problem or general manufacturing question, EXAIR is a great place to start. With over 100 years of industrial experience available and 45 years with the company, the Application Engineers who answer technical questions here at EXAIR should be able to help you. Even if we don’t have the product/process for you, we have a wealth of contacts that provide cooling, blow off, coating, cleaning and painting options to help you solve your problem. Just don’t call us about ghost, we’ve got nothin’. We could help you create a ghost effect for your April Fools joke.  Air Amplifiers and some neon streamers under a black light can scare anyone, but I will use that in some other blog.

Harold R

Bye Mr. Ramis you will be missed!

Dave Woerner
Application Engineer
Davewoerner@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_DW

Troubleshooting 101: Super Air Knife

Published on by Dave WoernerLeave a comment

Yesterday, I was working with a customer on troubleshooting a Super Air Knife. He had brought the knife into EXAIR’s demo room so I was able to verify a few items very easily.  When trouble shooting air knives there are no moving parts, so it is very small list of items to check.

  1. Check the Air Supply

  2. Check the plumbing

  3. Check the inside of the Air Knife for debris

The customer had a 36″ Super Air Knife ,and he was seeing some weak spots in the air flow as well as a gradient in flow from one side of the knife to the other.  The first thing I did was to install a pipe tee with a pressure gauge in both ports on the bottom of the knife.  This would allow me to monitor the pressure we were supplying to the knife to calculate the air consumption and ensure the our piping was not starving the knife for air.

IMG_3735

Feeding the knife with equal pressure from both sides, is necessary for any air knife 24 inches or longer. The customer immediately noticed that the flow from the knife lost any sort of gradient, once it was fed in (2) locations. Still the air knife exhibited a spot in the flow where air velocity significantly decreased.  Since we were getting correct pressure and supplying enough air, we decided to remove the cap from the Super Air Knife.  Under the cap we found a variety of debris and one dreaded piece of PTFE plumbing tape. The plumbing tape was suppose to prevent air leaks throughout the compressed air system, but a piece had become lodged in the air gap of the Super Air Knife preventing air flow through a small portion of the Super Air Knife.  As you can see, once we followed a few simple steps to ensure proper installation of the Super Air Knife, it was quick and easy to narrow down what caused the lack of performance. This is yet another reason to make sure you have clean and dry compressed air, as well as use a point of use filter separator.

Dave Woerner
Application Engineer
Davewoerner@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_DW