Energy Management

In modern and industrial work settings, people spend more than 90% of their time in enclosed spaces, such as warehouses, office buildings and factories. In most indoor environments, the air contains a variety of chemical and microbial particles, commonly defined as indoor pollutants, which can severely affect human health and product quality (1). Industries like food and beverage, medical devices and pharmaceutical manufacturers rely on their scheduled compliance testing to confirm the presence or absence of issues in workflow pipelines that are detrimental to the daily output and safety of the product.

ANSI /ISA–7.0.0–1996 is the globally-recognized quality standard for instrument air as defined by the Instrument Society of America. In this article, we’ll go through the Standard’s four elements of instrument air quality for use in pneumatic instruments.

After almost three and a half years of development work the Canadian Standards Association C837-16 document “Monitoring and Energy Performance of Compressed Air Systems” has finally been published and is available for download.  The work in writing the document was done by a CSA Technical Subcommittee made up of personnel from power utilities and government organizations, compressed air manufacturers and end users from both USA and Canada, with the committee activities facilitated and coordinated by the CSA Group (see list of committee members).

Over the years, analyzing compressed air system operation and efficiency has gone under various names and taken many different shapes and forms. You may know these as; Assessments, Audits, Studies, and Surveys, but in all cases the compressed systems are analyzed using techniques, such as metering and measuring, to assess the system’s performance and identify opportunities for improvement. The problem is that the results of these activities have varied widely; leaving the end-user to try and determine what is usable, credible and implementable. This has led to a lot of “no actions“, resulting in assessments, audits, studies, and surveys being put on the shelf to collect dust.

Most readers of this magazine are familiar with the ISO 9000 and 14000 families of standards.  The 9000 family pertains to quality management systems and the 14000 family deals with environmental management.

Compressors in today’s market must meet a variety of standards written by a wide range of organizations throughout the world.   Until recently, most standards were written to deal with safety, both mechanical and electrical, and performance of the individual components of a compressed air system.