Technology

Optimal compressed air system performance, defined by efficiency, reliability and air quality, has now become the main goal when operating, installing, purchasing or designing compressed air products. Whether you are the air compressor manufacturer, distributor or end user - everyone in the compressed air industry needs to be aware and work towards these goals.

In general, this article focuses on the definitions of terms often used to understand centrifugal air compressor performance. Comments are also made on how to measure power consumption. This article is not intended to be an engineering discussion of the various types and designs of centrifugal and other air compressors.

Earlier this year, BEKO Technologies completed the third renovation of its eight-year-old facility, which provided perfect timing for the company’s 25th Anniversary Event held on September 22, 2016 in Atlanta, GA.  The celebration marked 25-years of operating in the American markets after the German parent company, BEKO Technologies GmbH, first set up shop in the Tulsa, OK area in mid-December of 1990.  This important milestone was celebrated with a guided tour at the newly renovated American headquarters that included new product introductions and live demonstrations.

The useful and various properties of nitrogen (N2) in industrial applications rank it as one of the most specified gases in industry. For the manufacturer, nitrogen options exist in the choice of delivery system, compliance with clean air standards, safety and purity. In researching these choices, manufacturers can accurately select the optimum nitrogen supply required, often at a considerable savings. Selecting purity levels of 99.99% or higher in many industries and applications ads a variety of costs, both financial and efficiency, which may be needlessly incurred.

Made from various combinations of hops, grain, yeast and water, beer is a drink that has been produced for centuries. But while the ingredients are simple, the chemical processes behind the drink are anything but. Through various reactions, barley becomes fermentable sugars that are then digested by the active yeast to produce carbonation and alcohol. Although the basic principles behind brewing are little changed since their advent, the technological aspects are much improved. Today, large stainless steel tanks are used for fermentation and wort aeration, and complex, automated systems help with everything from temperature regulation to bottling.

Adsorption devices are commonly installed in compressed air systems to remove moisture.  Heatless compressed air dyers are the most common type furnished to meet the requirement for -40° F dew point “commercially dry” air, especially in systems of less than 1,000 standard cubic feet per minute (scfm).  Heatless air dryers are pressure swing adsorbers designed to retain the heat of adsorption within the desiccant beds during the drying process.

This article defines different aspects of regulator design and how they affect air wasted by droop. Some ways to reduce droop have be shown and some special case situations discussed. By taking care with regulator selection and installation, regulators can save large amounts of air instead of wasting it.

Pressure regulators are everywhere compressed air is used. These simple devices, essential for safe and steady equipment operation, can be a big waster of compressed air. This article shows how with proper regulator selection, installation and setting management you can save compressed air and lower system pressures. This article looks at regulators on production equipment not central regulators or Process Flow Controllers.

Technology is available which enables a compressed air flow meter to measure not only the magnitude of the flow, but also the direction. Why is this important? In this article we will describe two case studies where bi-directional compressed air flow measurement plays a key role to come to the right conclusions. In the first case study, we will describe an electronics manufacturing plant, which has a large interconnected ring network with two air compressor rooms located in different buildings. The two air compressor rooms are about five hundred feet apart. In the second case study, the effect of compressed air flow measurement upstream of a local receiver tank is described.

The objective of this project is to help the building automation industry develop novel products that more cost-effectively identify faults (unwanted conditions) and inefficiencies in the operation of the compressed air plants of industrial facilities.  More cost-effective fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) products can come to the building automation marketplace only after that industry makes very significant advances in the state-of-the-art of its FDD software tools from what it currently offers.  Those advances require making common practice of rules-based artificial intelligence (AI) methods that the building automation industry has shown little to no familiarity with in its technology so far.  This project will utilize, under controlled conditions, the compressed air plant of the NIST campus as a facility for test and development of an embedded rules-based FDD tool based upon NIST expertise.