Tag: super

Enhance Your EXAIR Product & More w/ Accessories

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

If you hang around with me for long enough, you will grow to understand that I love comedy movies. One of my favorite production groups is Broken Lizard. You might know some of their work and, just to be clear, I have seen all the movies, watched two of the guys’ TV shows, and listened to some of their podcasts. When trying to come up with a title for today’s blog, I looked up synonyms for “Accessorize”. The picture below shows the results.

If you haven’t seen Super Troopers, then I am not sure if we can continue to be friends. Actually, I won’t hold it against you. There is a scene in the movie where they are trying to get some information from a photo and so Ramathorn is sitting at a computer and working on the photo. He continually types and says, “Enhance” several times until the chief briskly informs him to just print the photo already. Unfortunately, I can’t share the clip here because there may be some inappropriate language at the end of the clip, so just believe my poor description that it is funny.

Well, all the products EXAIR offers in our Accessories catalog section will ENHANCE your point-of-use compressed air application. Whether it be a point-of-use filter/ oil removal filter, and a regulator with mounting brackets and coupling kits to ensure you have clean air being utilized. See the video below for just how well they work and why they are important to an installation.

Items like Swivel Fittings, Stay Set Hoses, and even lengths of Air Hose can give versatility in locations where hard piping and getting precise alignment of the air stream are needed. This can save the installer of a blowoff many fittings and hours of time on installation. The Swivel Fittings give a lock-in-place adjustment capable of 25° from centerline at 360° of rotation.

The Stay Set Hoses are another tool-free adjustable mounting option for point of use compressed air products. The ability to get rid of copper tubing, which is costly and can kink if proper tools aren’t used to bend it, is great for easy installation in the field. To see how easily they can be used, check out the video by John Ball below.

Even after these products we still offer a number of accessories that will aid operators in their production environment. If you want to discuss any part of the EXAIR product offering, please contact an Application Engineer today.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Application Spotlight! – Adjustable Air Amplifier Helps in a Messy Situation.

Published on by Jordan T ShouseLeave a comment

Applications spotlights have become a great resource for our customers to “peak” behind the curtain. For this spotlight, let’s talk about Air Amplifiers and cellophane. Cellophane wrapping is a common mid-process way to protect products between steps in the manufacturing process. And even more often, to protect the final product.

When you unwrap the cellophane, it becomes pretty hard to dispose of, it can often be statically charged and not easily tossed in a garbage bin.

A recent customer came to us as they were removing thousands of products from their individual cellophane to bulk pack them for a big box store. This created a huge mess with mountains of trash as tall as the trash can and all over the floor.

Our suggestion was to use an Air Amplifier to carry the trash cellophane away from the unwrapping station to a trash bin with a filtered lid to trap the cellophane. We chose model 6043, 3″ Adjustable Air Amplifier. We chose this method as the Air Amplifier is designed to entrain a very large amount of air at its suction side, allowing the operator to simply get the cellophane near the suction point, and it would be pulled in with the surrounding air.

Mock up of how the station would look. The 6043 has a 3″ ID hose on the outlet that moves the blue cellophane 15 feet to a trash location. The operator in green would just have to get the plastic close and the Air Amplifier does the rest.

In addition to this application and ventilation/exhaust applications, Air Amplifiers can be used – just like our engineered Air Knives and Air Nozzles – as a useful solution for blow off, drying, cleaning, and cooling applications. If you’ve got questions about them (or any EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Products), give me a call.

Jordan Shouse
Application Engineer

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Cellophane wrapped Pastries courtesy of Anthony Easton via creative commons

The Case For Adjustable Air Amplifiers

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

EXAIR Air Amplifiers come in two designs:

  • Super Air Amplifiers come in sizes from 3/4″ to 8″ output flow, and have:
    • A 2-bolt mounting flange that is integral to the body (except the 8″ which has a cast-in handle and feet instead).
    • Replaceable shims to set the compressed air flow and hence, consistent performance.
    • Rugged, aluminum construction.
  • Adjustable Air Amplifiers come in sizes from 3/4″ to 4″ output flow and have:
    • Aluminum or 303SS construction.
    • Quick adjustment by turning the exhaust end into or out of the body to infinitely set compressed air flow and hence, performance.
Super Air Amplifiers (left) can be easily installed using the 2-bolt mounting flange. Adjustable Air Amplifiers are compact & light enough to be supported by supply piping, even using a Swivel Fitting if you like.

Strictly considering air flow performance, there aren’t really any applications where one design will work, and the other won’t. Once the right size is determined, selection comes down to material of construction, how it’ll be installed, where it’ll be installed, and whether it’ll need to be quickly adjusted for flow & force on the device, instead of by regulating the compressed air supply.

I had the pleasure of talking to a caller just this morning about a “textbook” application for an Air Amplifier: welding smoke ventilation.

Maybe instead of a “textbook”, I should call it a “catalog” application because it’s literally the first image you see when you get to the Air Amplifiers section of the EXAIR Catalog.

The caller had an existing 4″ ID hose to place at the point of suction and connect to the Air Amplifier. This narrowed the choices down to the two Air Amplifier products with a 4″ outside diameter on the inlet: Model 120024 4″ Super Air Amplifier, and Model 6043 (or 6033) 3″ Aluminum (or Stainless Steel) Adjustable Air Amplifier. It was to be used in a typical shop environment, so the higher temperature rating (400F or 204C) or superior corrosion resistance of the Stainless Steel construction wasn’t needed. They intended to support it with the suction hose, hose-clamped onto the Air Amplifier itself, so the Super Air Amplifier’s 2-bolt mounting flange wasn’t necessary…in fact, they thought it might even get in the way. So, the Model 6043 3″ Aluminum Adjustable Air Amplifier made it to the top of the list pretty quickly.

Another important consideration for the caller was maximizing the exhaust flow. Looking at the performance data for the 4″ Super Air Amplifier and the 3″ Adjustable Air Amplifier, the latter generates just a little higher total air volume at the outlet, which, when you subtract the compressed air consumption from it, gives you the total flow rate of entrained air (and welding smoke, in this case):

The 730 SCFM Air Volume at Outlet, minus the air consumption of 29.2 SCFM, means that it’s drawing in ~700 SCFM.
Which is not bad.
The 774 SCFM Air Volume at Outlet, minus the air consumption of 29.2 SCFM, means that it’s drawing in ~740 SCFM.
Which is even better.

In addition to ventilation/exhaust applications, Air Amplifiers can be used – just like our engineered Air Knives and Air Nozzles – in blow off, drying, cleaning, and cooling applications. If you’ve got questions about them (or any EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Products), give me a call.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
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So Many Holes

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

I remember the book and movie about a young teenager who gets sent to a prison/ work camp that all they do is dig holes. Yeah, there’s a much deeper story line there and that isn’t the point of this blog. The point is, that movie is all I thought of when I encountered this customer’s nozzle solution. Their ejector nozzle on a recycling conveyor was using too much air and was too noisy.

Upon receiving the nozzle to do a free EXAIR Efficiency Lab, we were absolutely amazed at the level of care taken to make something like this. The nozzle was purpose built and definitely got the job done, it also drained their compressed air system at times and made a lot of noise while it did the work. So what did this nozzle look like, now keep in mind, this was not the customer’s design, it was a solution from the machine manufacturer.

For an idea, the customer nozzle was a 3″ overall length, and had a total of 162 holes in it. There were two inlets for 3/8″ push to connect tubing. The holes were very cleanly drilled and we used a discharge through orifice chart to estimate the consumption before testing. Operating pressure were tested at 80 psig inlet pressure.

Discharge through an orifice table.

Our estimations were taken from the table above. We used a pin gauge to determine the hole size and it came close to a 1/32″ diameter. With the table below we selected the 1.34 CFM per hole and used a 0.61 multiplier as the holes appeared to have crisp edges.

Estimation Calculation

Then, we went to our lab and tested. The volumetric flow came out to be measured at 130.71 SCFM. This reassured us that our level of estimation is correct. We then measured the noise level at 95.3 dBA from 3′ away. Lastly, we tested what could replace the nozzle and came up with a 3″ Super Air Knife with a .004″ thick shim installed. To reach this solution we actually tested in a similar setup to the customer’s for functionality as they sent us some of their material.

Now for the savings, since this customer was focused on air savings, that’s what we focused on. The 3″ Super Air Knife w/ .004″ thick shim installed utilizes 5.8 SCFM per inch of knife length when operated at 80 psig inlet pressure. So the consumption looks like below

That’s an astounding amount of air saved for each nozzle that is replaced on this line. The line has 4 nozzles that they want to immediately change out. For a single nozzle, the savings and simple ROI looks like the table below.

Air Savings / Simple ROI

That’s right, they will save 115.02 SCFM per minute of operation. These units operate for seconds at a time so the amount of actual savings is still to be determined after a time study. In videos shared, there was not many seconds out of a minute where one of the four nozzles was not activated. Once the final operation per minute is received we can rework our calculations and see how many hours of line operation it will take to pay back each knife purchase.

If you have any point of use blowoff or part ejection and even have a “nice looking” blowoff in place, don’t hesitate to reach out. These are still very different from our Engineered Solutions. We will help you as much as we can and provide test data, pictures, and even video of testing when possible.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF