Quick Disconnects are a quick and easy solution to hook up devices to your compressed air system. These units can be found in quite a few factories and are more often than not being used incorrectly. I know that on the air compressor in my garage, the only way to hook anything up to it was to use 1/4″ quick disconnects. Chances are they are even a few of them within your facility, assuming you have compressed air available.
When you really look at a quick disconnect though you start to see why it shouldn’t be used to install every compressed air driven device there is. You can see in the pictures below that a 1/4″ quick disconnect that goes to a 3/8″ NPT adapter has a .192″ opening at the small end. A 3/8″ Schedule 40 iron pipe will actually carry a .493″ inner diameter. If you were to use this quick disconnect on something like a 2″ Heavy Duty Line Vac, you will starve it for air due to the limited ability of the small diameter to carry enough air volume. This, in turn, will limit the performance of the Line Vac. This is because the through hole on the quick disconnect cannot pass enough air to feed through to the Line Vac.
On the 1/4″ quick disconnect to a 3/8″ NPT this may not be as large as a problem as the next picture. Below you can see a 1/2″ quick disconnect that is going up to a 3/4″ NPT. a 3/4″NPT Schedule 40 iron pipe is actually a .824″ inner diameter. The quick disconnect at most has a .401″ inner diameter.
Even though you are providing the correct thread size for your connection (a 3/8 MNPT and a 3/4 FNPT respectively in our example) the quick disconnect’s small inside diameter could be too much of a restriction for the volume demanded by an end use product. Due to this restriction point you will see pressure drops in your system when using a device with a properly sized inlet for its demand of compressed air being fed with an improperly sized quick disconnect. This is one of the main reasons one of our first questions in troubleshooting an EXAIR products performance with a customer is whether or not they are using quick disconnects.
If you would like to learn more about how to properly plumb your EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Product, feel free to contact us, or take a look around our Knowledge Base.
Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF
