Tag: digital flowmeter

Six Step to Optimization:  Step 2 – Finding and fixing leaks

Published on by John BallLeave a comment

Since air compressors use a lot of electricity to make compressed air, it is important to use the compressed air as efficiently as possible. EXAIR has six simple steps to optimize your compressed air system. Following these steps will help you to cut electricity costs, reduce overhead, and improve your bottom line. In this blog, I will cover the second step – Find and Fix leaks in your compressed air system.

One of the largest problems affecting compressed air systems is leaks.  That quiet little hissing sound from the pipelines is costing your company much money.  For the amount of electricity required to produce compressed air, a study was conducted by a university to determine the percentage of air leaks in a typical manufacturing plant.  In a poorly maintained system, they found on average that 30% of the compressor capacity is lost through air leaks.  A majority of companies do not implement a leak prevention program; as result, many end up with a poorly maintained system.  To put a dollar value on it, a leak that you cannot physically hear can cost you as much as $130/year.  That is just for one inaudible leak in hundreds of feet of compressed air lines.  For the leaks that you can hear, you can tell by the chart below the amount of money that can be wasted by the size of the hole.  Unlike a hydraulic system, compressed air does not create a mess; so, leaks will not appear at the source.  You have to locate them by some other means. 

Most leaks occur where you have threaded fittings, connections, hoses, and pneumatic components like valves, regulators, and drains.  The Optimization products from EXAIR are designed to help optimize your compressed air system, and the most effective way is to eliminate leaks.  The Ultrasonic Leak Detectors can find the air leaks, and the Digital Flowmeters can monitor your system flow especially for those times when production is not running.  With both of these products implemented in a leak preventative program, you will have a far easier time identifying and locating leaks in order to keep your compressed air system running in an optimum condition.

EXAIR Ultrasonic Leak Detector:

When a leak occurs, it emits an ultrasonic noise caused by turbulence.  These ultrasonic noises can be at a frequency which is inaudible for human hearing (> 20 kHz).  The EXAIR Ultrasonic Leak Detector, model 9207, can pick up these frequencies and make the leaks audible through a process called “heterodyning”.  With a signal strength number and bar graph level display, you can find very minute leaks.  It comes with two attachments; the parabola to locate leaks up to 20 feet away, and a tube attachment to define the exact location of a leak among many connections within a pipe.  Once you find a leak, it can be marked for fixing.  This simple-to-use instrument can save you a lot of money and headaches.  You can watch a video about the Ultrasonic Leak Detector at this LINK.

EXAIR’s Digital Flowmeter w/ USB Data Logger

EXAIR Digital Flowmeter:

With the Digital Flowmeters, you can continuously monitor for waste.  Air leaks can occur at any time within any section of your pneumatic area.  You can do systematic checks by isolating sections, using a Digital Flowmeter to review flow readings.  Another way to monitor your system would be to compare the results over time.  With the Digital Flowmeters, we do offer the USB Datalogger as an option.  You can set certain time increments to record the air flows.  Once the information is recorded, you can connect the USB to your computer, and with the downloadable software, you can view the information.  You can also export it into an Excel spreadsheet to monitor.  Once the flow information starts trending upward for the same process, then you can use the Ultrasonic Leak Detector to find if and where a leak may be present.  The Digital Flow Meter can also act as a preventive measure to indicate when a pneumatic system is starting to fail by analyzing readings over time.

Compressed air leaks will rob your system of its capacity, compressor life, and electrical cost.  It is important to have a leak preventative program to check for leaks periodically as they can happen at any time.  The EXAIR Ultrasonic Leak Detector and the Digital Flowmeters will help you accomplish this and optimize your compressed air system.  Once you find and fix all your leaks, you can then focus on improving the efficiency of your blow-off devices with EXAIR products like Super Air Knives, Super Air Nozzles, and Super Air Amplifiers, and save yourself even more money.  This blog is an overview of Step 2 of the six steps. You may have more questions; and, that is great! You can find them in other EXAIR blogs, or you can contact an Application Engineer at EXAIR.

John Ball
Application Engineer
Email: johnball@exair.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_jb

RoHS, EXAIR, And You

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

The 20th century was an amazing time for technological advances. In just 70 years, the science & engineering communities went from believing that powered flight was impossible, to actually powering a flight that took three astronauts all the way to the Moon…and back. In the 50 years or so since then, the computers with the power required for space travel went from needing a whole room, to being able to fit on our desks, and eventually, our pockets.

All three of these: a state of the art computer from 1962 (left), the desktop computer I’m writing this blog on (middle), and a smart phone being used for its most popular function (right) all have about the same amount of computing power, believe it or not. (full disclosure: I believe it because I used my smart phone to look that up on the internet)

Along with these amazing advances in technology came exponential increases in the materials it takes to make devices like desktop (or laptop) computers and smart phones…and some of those materials don’t get along well at all with the environment, and by extension, those of us who live in said environment. This doesn’t normally matter as long as those materials are housed inside an operating computer or cell phone (or myriad other electronic devices), but it DOES become a concern when they’re disposed of. When stuff like that ends up in landfills, for instance, it has a bad habit of making its way into the water table…and that’s not good for anyone.

In 2002, the European Union (EU) started pursuing legislation to restrict the use of certain hazardous substances, to get out ahead of disposal issues by keeping them out of products from the very beginning. This led to the creation & implementation of the RoHS Directive. It’s been revised, amended, and updated over the years, because it turns out there are no viable substitutes for SOME of those substances in SOME situations. Among these exceptions:

  • Mercury is used extensively in a number of energy efficient CFL light bulbs and fluorescent tubes, so there are exemptions for that, and it works because there’s a whole industry devoted to the proper recycling of these products.
  • My personal favorite is the specific exclusion for lead in the manufacture of pipe organs. Seems that the lead based alloy that’s been used for centuries is critical to the tonal qualities of the sound that the pipes produce. Since disposal rates of these are negligible (the use of this alloy is one of the reasons they LAST for centuries), pipe organ pipes don’t have to be RoHS compliant.

Compliance with the RoHS Directive is so important to EXAIR, it’s part of our Sustainability Plan. All of our products that are subject to the Directive have certificates of compliance (available upon request) that document their compliance. Per the specifics of the Directive, these are comprised of certain products in our Optimization, Static Eliminators, and Cabinet Cooler System product lines:

  • Optimization:
    • EFC Electronic Flow Control Systems
    • Digital Flowmeters
    • Digital Sound Level Meters
    • Ultrasonic Leak Detectors
  • Static Eliminators:
    • Super Ion Air Knives
    • Standard Ion Air Knives
    • Ionizing Bars
    • Super Ion Air Wipes
    • Ion Air Cannons
    • Ion Air Guns
    • Ion Air Jets
    • Power Supplies
    • Intellistat Ion Air Guns
    • Intellistat Ion Air Nozzles
    • Static Meters
  • Cabinet Cooler System products:
    • Electronic Temperature Control Systems
    • Thermostats & Capacitors
    • Solenoid Valves

These are all of our products that are electrical or electronic in nature. Our broad line of engineered compressed air products are not subject to the Directive, as they have no electrical or electronic components. We DO make sure these comply with other regulatory directives, as applicable, such as:

  • Conflict Mineral Free: All compressed air products
  • CE: All products
  • UL: Static Eliminators and Cabinet Cooler Systems are UL Listed, HazLoc Cabinet Cooler Systems are UL Classified
  • ATEX: These are a brand new line (as of this writing) of Cabinet Cooler products

If you’d like to find out more about EXAIR’s commitment to compliance with any of these standards or directives, give me a call.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
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Compressed Air Efficiency! “Step One”

Published on by Jordan T ShouseLeave a comment

I’m currently in the closing process of selling my first home. This is the house I got married in, brought my first child home to. Needless to say there has been a lot going on to get the place up to selling shape, one of those things was getting the HVAC system checked out to verify its running correctly and efficiently! (Spoiler, mine was running very well thank goodness)

With compressed air being considered a fourth utility its important we check the efficiency of the system and fix issues and install upgrades where we can! EXAIR has six simple steps to optimize your compressed air system. Following these steps will help you to cut electrical costs, reduce overhead, and improve your bottom line. In this blog, I will cover the first step – Measure the air consumption to find sources that use a lot of compressed air.

EXAIR Six Steps To Optimizing Your Compressed Air System

Data is important to have when diagnosing wasteful and problematic areas within your compressed air system. To measure air consumption, flow meters are used to find the volume or mass of compressed air per unit of time. Flow rates are very useful data points to find problems like leaks, over-use in blow-offs, waste calculations, and comparison analysis.

The first step to optimizing compressed air systems within an industrial facility is to get a known baseline. To do so, utilizing a digital flowmeter is an ideal solution that will easily install onto a hard pipe that will give live readouts of the compressed air usage for the line it is installed on.  There is also an additional feature that we offer on the Digital Flowmeters that can help further the understanding of the compressed air demands within a facility.

The Pressure Sensing Digital Flowmeters are available from 2″ Sched. 40 Iron Pipe up to 8″ Sched. 40 Iron Pipe.  As well as 2″ to 4″ Copper pipe.  These will read out and with the additional Data Logger or Wireless Capability options record the information. When coupled with the wireless capability an alarm can be set for pressure drops that give live updates on the system as well as permits data review to see system trends throughout the day.

Generating a pressure and consumption profile of a system can help to pinpoint energy wasters such as timer-based drains that are dumping every hour versus level based drains that only open when needed. A scenario similar to this was the cause of an entire production line shut down nearly every day of the week for a local facility until they installed flowmeters and were able to narrow the demand location down to a filter bag house with a faulty control for the cleaning cycle.

If you would like to discuss the best digital flowmeter for your system and to better understand the benefits of pressure sensing, please contact us.

Jordan Shouse
Application Engineer

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Fluid Mechanics – Boundary Layer

Published on by John BallLeave a comment

Fluid mechanics is the field that studies the properties of fluids in various states.  Fluid dynamics studies the forces on a liquid or a gas during motion.  Osborne Reynolds, an Irish innovator, popularized this dynamic with a dimensionless number, Re.  This number determines the state in which the fluid is moving; laminar, transitional, or turbulent.  For compressed air, a value of Re < 2300 will indicate a laminar air flow while the value of Re > 4000 will be in the range of turbulent flow.  Equation 1 below shows the relationship between the inertial forces of the fluid as compared to the viscous forces.

Equation 1:

Re = V * Dh / u

Re – Reynolds Number (no dimensions)

V – Velocity (feet/sec or meters/sec)

Dh – hydraulic diameter (feet or meters)

u – Kinematic Viscosity (feet^2/sec or meter^2/sec)

To dive deeper into the fluid dynamics, we can examine the layer which is next to the surface; the boundary layer.  This could refer to a wing on an airplane, a blade in a turbine, or inside compressed air lines.  In this blog, I will target the boundary layer inside pipes, tubes, and hoses that are used to transport compressed air.  The profile across the area (reference diagram below) is a velocity gradient.  The boundary layer is the distance from the wall or surface to 99% of the maximum velocity of the fluid stream.  At the surface, the velocity of the fluid is zero because the fluid is in a “no slip” condition.  As you move away from the wall, the velocity starts to increase.  The boundary layer thickness measures that area where the velocity is not uniform.  If you reach 99% of the maximum velocity very close to the wall of the pipe, the air flow is turbulent.  If the boundary layer reaches the radius of the pipe, then the velocity is fully developed, or laminar.  Mathematically, laminar flow can be calculated, but turbulent flow requires theories and experimental data to determine. 

As an analogy, imagine an expressway as the velocity profile, and the on-ramp as the boundary layer.  If the on-ramp is long and smooth, a car can reach the speed of traffic and merge without disrupting the flow.  This would be considered Laminar Flow.  Now imagine an on-ramp to be perpendicular to the expressway. As the car goes to merge into traffic, it will cause chaos and accidents.  This is what I would consider to be turbulent flow.     

In a compressed air system, similar things happen within the piping scheme.  Valves, tees, elbows, pipe reducers, filters, etc. are common items that will disrupt the flow.  Let’s look at a scenario with the EXAIR Digital Flowmeters.  In the instruction manual, we require the meter to be placed 30 pipe diameters from any disruptions.  The reason is to get a laminar air flow for accurate flow measurements.  In order to get laminar flow, we need the boundary layer thickness to reach the radius of the pipe where 99% of the air speed is represented at the center. 

Why is this important to know?  In many compressed air applications, the laminar region is the best flow to generate a strong force; efficiently and quietly.  Allowing the compressed air to have a more uniform boundary layer will optimize your compressed air system.  And for the Digital Flowmeter, it helps to measure the flow accurately and consistently.  If you would like to discuss further how to reduce “traffic jams” in your process, an EXAIR Application Engineer will be happy to help you.

John Ball
Application Engineer
Email: johnball@exair.com

Twitter: @EXAIR_jb

Photo: Smoke by Skitterphoto.  Pixabay license