Fluidics is an interesting discipline of physics. Air, in particular, can be made to behave quite peculiarly by flowing it across a solid surface. Consider the EXAIR Standard and Full Flow Air Knives:
If you’ve ever used a leaf blower, or rolled down the car window while traveling at highway speed, you’re familiar with the power of a high velocity air flow. Now consider that the Coanda effect can cause such a drastic redirection of this kind of air flow, and that’s a prime example of just how interesting the science of fluidics can be.
EXAIR Air Amplifiers, Air Wipes, and Super Air Nozzles also employ the Coanda effect to entrain air, and the Super Air Knife employs similar precision engineered surfaces to optimize entrainment, resulting in a 40:1 amplification ratio:
As fascinating as all that is, the entrainment of air that these products employ contributes to another principle of fluidics: the creation of a boundary layer. In addition to the Coanda effect causing the fluid to follow the path of the surface it’s flowing past, the flow is also affected in direct proportion to its velocity, and inversely by its viscosity, in the formation of a boundary layer.
This laminar, lower velocity boundary layer travels with the primary air stream as it discharges from the EXAIR products shown above. In addition to amplifying the total developed flow, it also serves to attenuate the sound level of the higher velocity primary air stream. This makes EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Products not only as efficient as possible in regard to their use of compressed air, but as quiet as possible as well.
If you’d like to find out more about how the science behind our products can improve your air consumption, give me a call.
So, you’ve selected a quiet, efficient, and safe EXAIR Super Air Nozzle for your blow off application – good call! – and now you’re thinking about how to install it. Sometimes, it’s as simple as replacing whatever you’re using right now:
Or maybe you’re using an open end blow off…in which case, you’re just an adapter away:
Perhaps, though, it’s a new installation, or the existing supply lines aren’t suitable for one reason or another. In those cases, we’ve still got you covered…consider the EXAIR Stay Set Hose:
Available in a variety of lengths from 6″ to 36″, they’re positionable, and re-positionable with a simple bending action. They won’t kink or easily fatigue like copper tubing. The supply end is 1/4 MNPT, and you have your choice of 1/4 MNPT or 1/8 FNPT on the other end, depending on which Super Air Nozzle, Air Jet you need to use it with.
We also offer Blow Off Systems, which are a combination of a specific Air Nozzle (or Air Jet,) fitted to a Stay Set Hose:
For added convenience and ease of installation, these products can also come with a Magnetic Base:
Stay Set Hoses are also available with a variety of our Soft Grip Safety Air Guns, and they make the GEN4 Stay Set Ion Air Jet one of our most popular Static Eliminator products. They’ve even been successfully applied with small Air Amplifiers and Air Knives…with certain limitations (spoiler alert: trying this with a 108″ Super Air Knife is going to be a definite “no.”)
From the beginning in 1983, EXAIR’s focus has been on being easy to do business with, and that goes from our friendly customer service to our expert technical support to our 99.9% on-time shipments (22 years and running) to designing our engineered products and value-added accessories with efficiency, safety, and ease of installation in mind. If you want to find out more, give me a call.
The Vortex Tube makes cold air for the same reason that a can of compressed air gets cold when I clean my computer keyboard, right?
That’s a common question, and since they both start with compress air and end up with cold(er) air, it’s not an unreasonable assumption. But the answer is no; they’re not the same. Both are curious physical phenomena, though:
Cans of compressed air get cold while they’re discharging because of a thermodynamic principle known as the adiabatic effect. When you pressurize a gas by compressing it into a container, you’re putting all those molecules into a smaller volume of space…and you’re adding potential energy by the compression. Then, when you release that gas back to atmospheric pressure, that energy has to go somewhere…so it’s given off in the form of heat – from the air inside the can, as the pressure inside the can decreases. Now, the air that’s not under as much pressure as it was when you pushed the button on top of the can is going to start coming out of the can pretty soon. I mean, there’s only so much air in there, right? So, since it’s given off that energy immediately upon the drop in pressure, when it comes out of the can, it’s at a lower temperature than it was before you started spraying it out.
Vortex Tubes, on the other hand, generate a flow of cold air by a completely different phenomenon of physics called, maybe not so curiously, the Vortex Tube principle:
If you need a reliable and dependable flow of cold air, look no further than EXAIR’s comprehensive line of Vortex Tubes and Spot Cooling Equipment. We’ve got 24 models of Vortex Tubes to choose from, as well as “out of the box” solutions for cooling applications like the Adjustable Spot Cooler, Mini Cooler, Cold Gun Aircoolant Systems. and, to protect your sensitive electrical and electronic enclosures from heat, Cabinet Cooler Systems. If you’d like to find out more, give me a call.
Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
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