As with any EXAIR Product, we always recommend the installation of a particulate filter. If there is any oil present in your air supply, an oil filter is also recommended after the particulate filter. Nearly all of our products have no moving parts to wear out and will never require maintenance so long as they’re supplied with clean, condensate free, oil-free air. If the air is not filtered prior, anything contained within the air is going to be passed through into your process. Debris could also eventually clog up the tight orifices in the product itself. Eventually the debris/oil will end up clogging it up and stop performing as it should. This leads to downtime while the root cause of the issue is sorted out, and subsequent maintenance of the product that has been clogged.
I recently worked with a brewing company that had a machine with one of our ¾” Model 120020 Super Air Amplifiers installed. It was used on a canning line and would dry off the cans after a washing operation before being marked with a date code. Up until recently it had worked just fine without any issues. Now they were noticing residual moisture leftover on the cans that was preventing a legible date code from being marked on the outside. Further investigation led them to determine that the outlet flow from the amplifier had been reduced to almost nothing. Since their compressor delivers oil-free air and they used stainless steel piping, they didn’t think it was necessary to install a filter.
The Super Air Amplifier is a maintenance-free product, when supplied with clean, condensate free air of course. After removing the plug from the body, they noticed a significant amount of oil present inside the plenum chamber and around the shim. This was clogging up the nozzle and restricting airflow through the unit. The photo below shows the inside of the amplifier prior to cleaning. The fine-toothed shim at the bottom is hardly even noticeable. In looking upstream, they noticed an oiler that was necessary for many of the other pneumatic components of the machine. This same air supply was being used to supply the compressed air to our Super Air Amplifier.
At our instruction, they installed an oil-filter on a new line dedicated just to this amplifier. And after cleaning the Super Air Amplifier the problem drying off the cans immediately stopped and they were back up in running in no time. Now that they had removed the oil from their air supply, this issue won’t return and they can begin operating the way we intend it to, maintenance free!
Tyler Daniel
Application Engineer
E-mail: TylerDaniel@EXAIR.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_TD
