Tag: duct air booster

Optimizing Your Compressed Air Usage With Engineered Products

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

The first new car I ever bought was a 1995 Ford Escort Wagon. I’ve mentioned this before in posts about preventive maintenance, the importance of proper filtration, and brand loyalty. Those blogs were primarily about my experiences with that little red wagon, but today I wanted to discuss the primary reason I bought the car in the first place.

I had a 50-mile round trip commute to work, and my old Pontiac Grand Prix with the small block V8 engine was a great ride for sure. Some quick math, however, showed that if I went with something with better gas mileage, I could save quite a bit of money on gasoline. My calculation was almost $1,000 a year, just on driving back & forth to work. After figuring in the rest of my driving for the first year, it was more like $1,400 a year.

Similar to my “upgrade” to a more fuel efficient vehicle, upgrading blowoff, cooling and drying operations using engineered compressed air products is Step #3 in EXAIR’s Six Steps To Optimizing Your Compressed Air System. We’ve assigned an order to these steps in accordance with basic good engineering practice & protocol, but it’s not necessary to follow them in any particular order. In fact, all six steps really don’t apply to every single compressed air system.

Step #3 does apply to most systems, though. I spent a fair amount of time in all sorts of industrial facilities in my previous roles, servicing industrial & chemical pumps, and almost all the time, regardless of the industry or the size of the facility, the maintenance part of the facility used air guns. However, I don’t recall ever seeing an engineered nozzle on one before I came to EXAIR. Since then, I’ve worked with a BUNCH of users to dramatically reduce compressed air consumption by replacing their cheap and inefficient air guns with EXAIR Safety Air Guns, or by retrofitting EXAIR Super Air Nozzles onto their existing air guns. We actually carry adapters to fit our Super Air Nozzles to a number of readily commercially available air guns for that very purpose.

The five families of EXAIR handheld blowoff products include VariBlast Precision & Compact, Soft Grip, Heavy Duty, SuperBlast, and TurboBlast Safety Air Guns. They’re available with a range of engineered Super Air Nozzles, Extensions, and Chip Shields.

In addition to air guns & nozzles, our Air Knives have a long history of replacing drilled pipes & pipe manifolds with inefficient nozzles used to make a curtain of air flow. The following chart details the savings you can realize from the use of a 24″ Super Air Knife instead of similar devices for a 24″ wide air curtain:

Even though an electric powered blower will use less electricity than the amount of electricity an air compressor uses to supply an engineered product like the Super Air Knife, the maintenance costs make the total cost of ownership eclipse that of the engineered Air Knife.

Our Case Study Library (registration required, but it’s free & fast) documents many real-world situations where customers worked with us to gather & publish “before/after” documentation, proving out the benefits of Step #3. I encourage you to check those out, and if you think you might have an opportunity to do a Case Study with us, we offer discounts or credit for that…give me a call.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
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Stories From The Field: Automotive Plant Tour

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

Throughout my years I have been in many manufacturing facilities. Oddly enough, I have seen nearly every part of a passenger car manufactured and then fully assembled. The amount of compressed air applications in automotive supplier and manufacturing facilities are tremendous. Here are some stories from just a few we have encountered over the years, and all of them can be found in our Application Database.

Air Wipe – How it works
  1. A component manufacturer, specifically a steering and transmission component manufacturer was having issues with machined parts coming out of a CNC machine with too much oil based cutting fluid on them and not passing inspection process because the oil would throw off the automated measuring system. The part was a splined shaft that the high surface tension oil stayed in the splines. The part was removed from the machine via robotic loader and set onto a fixture. The path to the fixture was outfitted with a Super Air Wipe so the robotic loader could move the part into and out of the air wipes’s airflow and remove the oil. The converging airflow of the Super Air Wipe was ideal to keep the peaks and valleys of the shaft clean of oil and they were able to direct oil back into the cutting machine so no separate collection system was needed.
Robotic Welder fitted with EXAIR Super Air Wipe

2. A seat bracket manufacturer had issues protecting the lenses on their vision systems from welding spatter. They were again able to reduce the replacement / repair downtime by installing a 9″ Super Air Wipe in front of the robotic mounted lens and keep the spatter / fumes from ever making it to the lens, resulting in expanded run times between repair / downtime.

Cooling with Air Amplifiers

3. A forging company manufacturing the pistons was having issues reducing the temperature of the pistons as they were assembled to the connecting rods. The solution for them was to install a series of Super Air Amplifiers over the fixtured, indexing line and at each dwell station a Super Air Amplifier would activate and cool down the assembly by moving large volumes of ambient air mixed with small amounts of compressed air onto the surfaces.

4. An automotive manufacturer had issues with stamping shavings and welding debris staying on the surface of parts and fixtures resulting in rework and defective parts. Implementing a series of Super Air Nozzles, and Super Air Knives resulted in debris removal that saved tooling rework as well as production reject parts.

5. Another automotive / recreational vehicle manufacturer needed help with their torture test machine for suspension components. They were utilizing fans to try and keep shock sensors cool and replicate air movement. electric fans were not able to provide a focused airflow and so enter the Super Air Amplifiers. These have also been utilized on engine torture test machines.

1 – Chevrolet Corvette C7 2014 – LT1 Engine Testing on Dyno

These are just a select few of the actual applications that I have actually help with over the course of the years. As a whole, we have helped endless number of automotive industry applications. It doesn’t matter if you are in the automotive industry or just a garage tinkerer, contact and Application Engineer and let us help you with your point of use compressed air application today.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

1 – Autoblog_gr; Chevrolet Corvette C7 2014 – LT1 Engine Testing on Dyno – retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3h8imnOPwU on 8/31/2022

Air Amplifiers to Increase Volume of Airflow Aid in Cooling, Cleaning, Circulation, Venting

Published on by bdwagesLeave a comment

Air Amplifiers are a perfect solutions for utilizing air for Venting, Exhausting, Cooling, Drying, or Cleaning with no moving parts. As the name implies, these tools produce a high volume and a high velocity of outlet flow. These are very quiet, efficient and can amplify your air consumption up to 25 times… Here is a great diagram and description of exactly how these work:

Air Amplifiers use the Coanda Effect to generate high flow with low consumption.

As you can see, these fine pieces of engineering genius have no moving parts, and require no electricity. You can easily control the flow, force and velocity by opening or closing the air gap (fixed with a shim) and regulating the the supply air. These can also be ducted on each end to either pull in or remove air or fumes from one room or area to another.

SUPER?? What makes our Super Air Amplifier super? I’m glad you asked. The Super Air Amplifier has a patented design that uses a special shim to maintain critical position of the component parts. This results in a precise amount of compressed air to be released at exact intervals towards the center of the Super Air Amplifier. These jets of air create a constant, high velocity outlet flow across the entire cross-sectional area. This balances out the airflow to maximum performance, this simultaneously minimizes wind shear, causing sound levels up to 3 x’s quieter than other comparable air movers. To completely understand how much air this Super Air Amplifier amplifies (try saying that fast 5 times), please see the below chart.

As you can see, the amplification ratio is between 12 and 25 x the amount of air consumed. For the right applications, these are game changers… Pro tip – notice that even the highest level still falls under OSHA guidelines for noise!!

If you have any questions, or would like to discuss your application directly, please reach out today. We would love to speak with you, and help wherever we can.

Thank you for stopping by,

Brian Wages

Application Engineer

EXAIR Corporation
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Interesting Compressed Air Application:  Cooling a Smokestack with Air Amplifiers

Published on by johnball2014Leave a comment

In some cities when you look along the skyline, you see flue stacks bellowing out plumes of white smoke.  I never paid much attention to the structure except that they were tall and in some cases very wide.  A power company contacted EXAIR about their flue stacks.  They did a temperature reading, and they found a hotspot within the wall of the stack.  To cool the hotspot, they contacted EXAIR for a solution. 

Smokestacks are large chimneys that can be from 825 feet (250m) to 1,188 feet (360m) tall and are designed to release the smoke high in the air.  As a tall structure, it is important to keep the walls stable and sound.  For this customer, they were getting a hotspot reaching a temperature of 750oF (400oC).  This was too hot, and it could cause premature issues to the construction of the stack.  They wanted to reduce the temperature to 400oF (204oC) to keep the stack from warping and degrading.  We were able to find a solution using our stainless steel Adjustable Air Amplifiers. 

Adjustable Air Amplifier

The area of the hotspot in their smokestack was a section around 2 feet (0.6m).  The customer fabricated a stainless-steel manifold to mount three pieces of model 6033 3” 303SS Adjustable Air Amplifiers.  The model 6033 will only use 35.2 SCFM (997 SLPM) of compressed air at 80 PSIG (5.5 bar).  With the high amplification ratio, the model 6033 can move 2,323 SCFM (65,780 SLPM) of air along the surface.  The large volume of air created good cooling capacities to reduce the hotspot temperature.  In keeping the temperature of the stack under control, they could continue operations and lessen the concern for untimely shut-downs and costly maintenance. 

By using air to cool, you can do it safely and cleanly.  Unlike fans which create turbulent flows, voids, and high noise levels, the EXAIR Air Amplifiers generates a large volume of laminar air to cool and clean.  If you would like to speak about any cooling application, you can contact an Application Engineer; even something as large as a smokestack. 

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

Photo:  Smokestack by cwizner.  Pixabay Licence