Industrial Utility Efficiency

Technology

Compressed air production in industrial facilities consumes 10% of electrical power, on average. While this can vary up or down, it is an industrial average, and is very significant in most plants.
Do you know how much of your power cost goes to producing compressed air? We’ll come back to this at the end of this article.
 

Mattei Rotary Vane Technology Advancing Efficiency and Durability

Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine interviewed Mr. Bill Kennedy, Global Marketing Manager, Mattei Compressors.

If the electricity costs 8x what you paid to purchase the compressor, and you can reduce that value by 20% or more, the compressor is virtually free as the energy savings provide a return-on-investment that exceeds the purchase price. Now, if you eliminate the need to ever have to overhaul the airend you gain a massive financial and long-term reliability advantage.

Five Decades of Innovation at Festo USA

The history of Festo began in 1925 in Germany. Festo USA was founded on March 15th, 1972 in Port Washington on Long Island, with the focus of being a full-line supplier of pneumatics – a focus we continue with today.

When Three Air Compressors Are Better Than One (or Two)

During Dealer Week, they needed enough compressed air to power multiple machines at a time all day long. Keeping simultaneous demos running for all their top machines required airflow of up to 400 cubic feet per minute (CFM). However, outside of Dealer Week, their compressed air demands were quite modest. On a typical day, they only needed 20 CFM to power their dust collection system and pneumatic tools for their dock and warehouse crating areas. 

Air Compressor and Dryer Innovation Unveiled at Best Practices 2022 EXPO & Conference

In early October 2022, professionals from around the world gathered at the Best Practices 2022 EXPO & Conference in Atlanta to source and learn about the latest on-site utilities powering modern plant automation including compressed air, blowers, vacuum, pneumatics, motors and cooling water systems. This report recaps a fraction of the event’s education curriculum and provides an editorial tour of sponsoring exhibitors’ machinery displays and product introductions.

Atlas Copco Compressors Enables Sustainability-Based Production

The U.S. air compressor market has a compressed air installed base of at least 15 million horsepower. Further, it evaluated various air audits across different customer types, sizes and segments and determined U.S. manufacturers stand to save around 13 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) annually in electricity associated with compressed air. That translates to a savings of $1 billion in energy costs per year, which would remove nine million metric tons of CO2 annually. That equates to more annual energy usage of more than 1 million homes in the United States.

Boosting Process Vacuum Performance at a High-Tech Electronics Plant

Electronics applications typically run their tooling requiring Process Vacuum based on differential pressure from barometric; that is, they control their PVAC pumps to “Inches of Mercury Vacuum”. This is because the parts and pieces being manipulated by vacuum are of certain sizes, shapes, and weights. If the differential pressure across the part is not great enough, then the tooling will fail and result in a loss of product, adverse impact to quality, and production downtime. 

SMC Innovates Pneumatic Solutions for Sustainable Automation

Headquartered in Noblesville, Indiana, SMC Corporation of America has grown exponentially since the company began operations in the United States in 1977. Today, the Noblesville campus occupies 345 acres and encompasses 2.6 million square feet of manufacturing and warehouse space. 

DOE Better Plants Partners Get Serious About Compressed Air Systems

Compressed air is used in all the company’s plants and is often the single largest energy end use within them. As a result, compressed air energy-saving measures are often replicable across the company and offer significant positive impacts. One area of focus is with compressed air leaks since they are “the best low hanging fruit to focus on and they always keep popping up and waste energy”.

Air Compressors

When selecting an air compressor for your manufacturing operation, the common choice is the

Air Treatment/N2

In early October 2022, professionals from around the world gathered at the Best Practices 2022 EXPO

Blowers

The plant upgrades, in combination with a progressive management strategy, allows the plant to

Compressor Controls

A large chemical plant in Celje, Slovenia, planned to retrofit a kiln used to produce titanium

Instrumentation

Have you ever had a failing dryer in your compressed air system, ruining your production output,

Pneumatics

Headquartered in Noblesville, Indiana, SMC Corporation of America has grown exponentially since the

Vacuum

The IWF 2022 International Woodworking Fair was held August 23-26 at the Georgia World Congress

Cooling Systems

With efficient heat exchange an important requirement in the design of an HVAC system, the type of