Question: My compressed air dryer is rated at 100° F inlet air temperature. What will happen if the air temperature is lower than this? Answer: Having the air temperature lower than the dryer rating is a good thing. Actually, dryers are commonly rated at 100° F inlet temperature, 100 psi and 100° F ambient temperature. […]
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Compressed air: A bike tire analogy
Running out of pressure? Think about storage volume. Consider this — remember when you had your 10-speed bike with those thin tires? You could ride quite fast, but when it came to filling up the tubes to the proper pressure, all it took was a small shot on the fill valve to change the pressure […]
Compressed air fail: Dusty filters
A sawmill ran a set of six large air-cooled compressors to feed their various processes. To cool the compressors, the air was drawn from outdoors and mixed with indoor air to keep temperatures from freezing the compressors in winter. This facility has a tough environment for cooling air because of the sawdust. To attempt to […]
Analytics power: optimizing operations through digital transformation
Contributed by Amit Patel • Senior Marketing Manager, Digital Transformation at Emerson Digital technologies along with pneumatics automation can transform a facility’s efficiency, productivity, and versatility. The digital transformation of processing and packaging operations is well underway. Manufacturers are integrating connected technologies into their operations and seeing significant results. Digital technologies have the power to […]
Are two VSD compressors a problem?
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 […]
Compressed air fail: A forgotten step
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 […]
How do you flow test an air compressor?
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 […]
Compressed air fail: Two flow meters
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, […]
Compressed air fail: Air water cooling
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 […]
Compressed air fail: Dryer signature
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 […]
