SMART dryers offer significant savings
May 1st 2005 Compressed air is regarded as the fourth utility in industry and used in many applications. It’s important that the compressed air is both clean and dry. If the compressed air supply is contaminated then there will be additional cost, with rejects, spoilage and downtime. This was the experience of King Machine, based in Akron, Ohio, USA…
King Machine manufacture tools used in car tyre manufacturing - sidewall plates and tread segment moulds. There’s a requirement to remove the metal chips and particles that stick to the tool shanks as the moulds are machined from mild steel and aluminium billets. Failure to remove the metal chips would result in inaccurate cutting. The metal debris is cleared from the tool and its spindle with a ‘blast’ of compressed air as tools are automatically changed during in the mould machining process.
However, water that had collected in the airlines was being sprayed out onto the cutting tools along with the compressed air.
This caused tools to rust and twice several thousand pounds had to be spent on replacements. Water in the compressed air supply also caused rust in the plant’s air motors, resulting in downtime after just a few weeks of operation. Rebuilding something like 10 motors per week was taking around five hours of labour and cost several hundred pounds in parts.
The installation of a Parker membrane air dryer removed these problems, by ensuring a supply of clean dry air. Parker membrane air dryers operate using very different technology to the conventional methods of drying compressed air - such as refrigeration dryers or pressure swing adsorption. It’s this difference in technology and the way in which the dryers operate that means that compressed air users gain some unique advantages with Parker membrane air dryers…
Membrane air dryers from Parker offer users lower operating costs and better performance than both non-cycling and cycling refrigerant air dryers while also eliminating the downtime and costly repairs that result from dirty, wet compressed air.
Parker's new SMART Dryer 5000 series membrane drying system produces a dew point of 2°C and removes all other compressed air contaminants down to 0.01 microns in size. With flow rates across the six variants ranging from 170 to 1,019m3/hr (100 to 600scfm), sophisticated technology is used to monitor the airflow and automatically adjusts the regenerative sweep flow as required. This continual adjustment keeps energy consumption low; plus there’s the additional benefit that SMART dryers require no electricity themselves to operate.
A feature of the technology of membrane dryers is that the water vapour removed from the air remains as vapour. With refrigerant dryers, the way in which air is dried is to cool the air until water vapour condenses. This can result in significant volumes of condensate. A typical 1,000 scfm (1,700 m3/h) compressor and refrigerant dryer combination may produce 220,000 litres (4,840 gallons) of oily condensate per year requiring special disposal measures – at additional cost to you.
The SMART Dryers significantly outperform refrigerant air dryers in dew point reduction and are far less expensive to operate. In a typical application, with a 170m3/hr (100scfm) drier operating at 75% capacity (on average), for an eight-hour shift, energy savings alone are impressive.
But when the 80% saving in maintenance costs (compared to a refrigerant air dryer) are factored in, annual savings become significant. Indeed, total operating costs are in the region of 35-40% less than those for a non-cycling refrigerant dryer. More articles from Parker Filtration: | 
