Question: I’m a compressor salesperson. Lately, the large building tenders we’ve seen have been spec’d for two variable speed screw compressors to run together sharing the load. This would make sense to me if one was a 100% backup and they never ran together, but that does not seem to be the case. Everything I’ve […]

A large industrial company was having problems with its air quality.  Water was appearing as if at random at one of its most critical processes, causing instrumentation failures and contamination of the product.  This issue was difficult to understand because it looked like the refrigerated air dryer was working fine — and dewpoint looked good […]

As compressors age, there can be internal wear or control problems that affect the flow output capacity. Often times, observing the amps of the compressor — and comparing that to the motor nameplate — can show if a compressor has problems. If the amps are low, that usually means the compressor flow capacity is lower […]

There is an old saying about a man with two watches who never knows what time it is. One wonders if this applies to having two flow meters? Fig. 1 shows the comparison of two thermal mass flow meters measuring the same compressed air stream. We can see there is a disparity between the readings, […]

Desperate times call for desperate measures — or at least that is what the maintenance personnel at a chemical plant thought when they had production outages caused by overheating of their water-cooled, lubricant free compressor. So, they rigged up some cooling using a compressed air powered ring jet nozzle (Fig. 1) and directed a flow […]

A compressed air auditor placed data loggers on a single compressor system with a fixed cycle heatless desiccant dryer.  The pressure at the compressor discharge and dry storage tank was also measured, along with the compressor input amps. On examination of the system profile, it was determined the compressor was rapid-cycling due to lower than […]

Question: On our air compressor, we have a drain at the bottom of what looks like a filter, located after the air cooler.  The drain failed so we turned it off … how important is it anyway? Answer: Here is the data you need to know about condensed water flow in compressed air systems (taken from […]

In the compressed air world, the hottest thing in the market lately has been the introduction of variable speed drive controlled compressors. Being hot (as in popular) is good — but being hot as in temperature is not so great. These units, if installed appropriately, can stabilize the air pressure, and save significant amounts of […]