The Blowoff Kit consists of seven sets of air jets and nozzles to blow off chips, dry off liquids, and cool parts. The jets emit finely focused, powerful air streams that can, for example, clean chips out of drilled holes. The larger-bore nozzles direct wider streams, which can be used, for example, to dry a 3-inch-wide aluminum strip.

This arrangement of Exair jets and nozzles uses free entrainment to have 25 times more ambient air than compressed air clean lubricant and chips from machined parts, reducing compressed air consumption and its costs by 80 percent.

Operators select the nozzles and jets, which are threaded to attach to piping or hoses, to perform a variety of tasks simultaneously on complex parts. High-velocity jets can clean coolant and chips out of cupped areas, while small nozzles can dry out threads and other nozzles dry the remainder of the part.

Openings in the sides of the nozzles and jets draw in high volumes of ambient air—called free entrainment—and put it to work. Free entrainment enables the nozzles and jets to use 25 times more ambient air than compressed air, reducing compressed air consumption by 80 percent. The company claims a reduction in noise pressure level of about 10 decibels compared with most standard blowoff systems.

Positech Corp. of Fairfield, Ohio, a CNC job shop that serves automotive, aerospace, construction, and machine tool manufacturers, attaches the nozzles to air hoses at its machining, washing, and cooling stations. The company reported that the Exair air emitters run quietly and have a high capacity for blowing chips off parts for the amount of compressed air they use.

The Exair nozzles and jets are typically made of aluminum or copper to keep the price at about $199. The Blowoff Kit's nozzles and jets are also available in stainless steel to serve high-temperature applications, such as serving parts exiting a furnace, or corrosive applications, for example, blowing acid off batteries.

P-ESS Sheet Metal Fab Inc., a precision sheet metal fabricator and job shop in Roseville, Mich., uses the aluminum Exair jets and nozzles to create an air curtain to blow solvent or water off automotive parts after they leave an industrial bath. The company also focuses the adjustable air emitters to clean off chips from its parts.

Operators fit the unloader to a silo. The machine consists of a box beam, which spans the silo and forms an access tunnel to the Planetaire's mechanical parts, and an Archimedes screw suspended from the beam. The screw is buried under the material on the bottom of the silo, just a few inches above the floor.

Upon activation, the screw rotates and moves radially, removing product from the bottom of the silo and discharging it through a central discharge chute.

As the screw in the Planetaire unloader rotates, it removes granular product from the bottom of the silo and discharges it through a central chute.

The progressive screw diameter and pitch enable the Planetaire to extract bulk solids uniformly from the base of the silo, and send them smoothly through the discharge chute. Operators set the unloading rate at up to 400 metric tons per hour. The screw can sweep up to 66 feet in diameter, and accommodate silos filled up to 164 feet.

Because the box beam transfers loads to supports located outside the silo, the unloader can accommodate different heights of material. Operators can access the drive systems and screw even when the silo is full, easing inspection and maintenance.

Metal Seal anodizes and galvanizes anti-lock brake components for the Big Three American car manufacturers. Previously, rinse water flowed continuously—the plant operates 24 hours per day—to several collection tanks, where the plating company's workers added chemicals to condense metallic wastes and precipitate them out of the solution, which would then be sent to the sewer system. The combined labor and chemical costs were between $12 and $17 per 1,000 gallons of wastewater.

In the system installed by Kinetico in April, spent rinse water is sent to a collection tank, where some city water is added to make up for evaporation losses. The water is pressurized to flow through Kinetico's Macrolite ceramic medium in order to remove suspended solids. The stream is sent through vessels containing activated carbon to remove organic contaminants and sodium hypochlorite—bleach—from the city water, which would harm the plating processes.

Charged polymer beads in the Kinetico wastewater treatment system enable Metal Seal to reduce its waste treatment costs significantly.

Exiting the activated carbon vessels, the water enters a tank, holding positively charged and negatively charged polymer beads that remove specific metal wastes, including aluminum, chrome, iron, and zinc, on an ionic level. The water can then be reused in the process.

The Kinetico system is self-regenerating, so that when one cleansing loop is spent, it will automatically shift the waste stream to a second processing loop while the first is replenished.

It now costs Metal Seal from $2 to $4 to clean 1,000 gallons of wastewater, and the company has reduced its use of fresh water to 5,000 gallons per day.

A key component of the restoration is building Storm Water Treatment Areas that will use pumping stations to send large quantities of phosphorous runoff into agricultural basins five or 10 miles square. There, native plant life will absorb phosphorous so that the water can be pumped back into the Everglades without disrupting its ecosystem.

Each of the four largest pumps provided so far by Flowserve for the Everglades restoration project can handle 950 cubic feet of water per second.

The South Florida Water Management District commissioned Flow-serve Corp.'s pump division, which specializes in tailoring pumping equipment for large-scale industrial applications, to provide a total of 25 mammoth pumps for the Everglades stations under the terms of a $40 million contract. Flowserve, based in Irving, Texas, uses Ingersoll Rand, Ingersoll Dresser, Worthington, and Byron Jackson pump lines, among others, in these applications.

Flowserve built and installed eight of the pumps in the first two Everglades pumping stations in October and November. Four of the pumps move 950 cubic feet of water per second each, and the other four move 470 cubic feet of water per second each. The larger-capacity pumps have a discharge diameter of 130 inches. "This required the design and manufacture of a unique discharge configuration that siphons water smoothly, preventing cavitation or swirling from blocking flow, and easing the horsepower load on the pump engine," said Chuck Jones, an ASME member and director of Water Resources at Flowserve.

The Flowserve engineers built and tested a 1/6-scale prototype first, then built the full-scale pumps in sections at its Taneytown, Md., facility and shipped them to the Florida site. There, they were welded together under the supervision of John Ondrejack, a mechanical engineer and the company's regional manager. The concrete inlets of the pumps, about the size of a two-car garage, were also prefabricated in sections and assembled on-site.

The pump engines have an interesting pedigree that follows the Biblical admonition to beat swords into plowshares. Flowserve found 1,000- and 2,000-hp Fairbanks diesel engines that originally served as backup generators on U.S. nuclear submarines now mothballed in the Pacific Northwest. Ondrejack's team removed, refurbished, and installed the engines, one to a pump, in the Everglades.

The first two pumping stations served as demonstration models for others being built. Flowserve will supply another set of nine, and a final set of seven pumps, to complete the project within the South Florida Water Management District's 2006 deadline.

The systems integrator, Automated Systems Inc. of Markham, Ontario, had provided testing systems to Innovative Cooling Dynamics in the past, and was tasked with improving both assembly and testing of four key pressing operations at the Mississauga plant. These were pressing a bearing into the pump housing, pressing a drive hub onto the pump shaft, pressing a seal into the pump housing, and pressing the impeller onto the pump shaft.

The typical solution for Automated Systems would be to build four separate, asynchronous inline assembly systems with a testing station for each pressing operation, but this would incur heavy capital investment and take up valuable floor space. As an alternative, the systems integrator suggested using four electromechanical presses, or EMAPs, designed by Promess Inc. of Brighton, Mich., to perform assembly and inspection simultaneously. This alternative eliminated the four testing stations, reducing the overall cost of the systems and reducing their footprint by 20 to 25 percent.

Innovative Cooling Dynamics uses an electromechanical press to install this impeller onto an automotive pump shaft and test the assembly.

The Promess EMAP uses a servo-motor with a built-in encoder to drive a ball screw ram that presses parts into place. The press is equipped with a force and distance sensor enabling the press to both monitor and control force and position.

The EMAP uses signature analysis to plot the force required to assemble two parts according to the distance they travel. This means that the EMAP operators set the upper and lower tolerance.

The machine contains sensors that eliminate the need for subsequent inspection. The EMAP also can receive inputs from external sensors. This enables the presses to automatically compensate for deflection, part creeping, and temperature influence, to produce the desired assembled tolerances.

In addition, Innovative Cooling Dynamics uses the EMAP's signature analysis to spot defects—for example, parts that are too hard or soft, or out-of-tolerance holes or shaft diameters—to improve quality control of the finished pumps.

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