Compressed Air Best Practices - January 2008 - (Page 41)

Compressed Air Industry ENERGY MANAGEMENT | 01/08 | We are now adding demand-side system components to modify existing production machines. We are now working with air curtains, cylinders and pneumatic circuits to improve the speed and efficiency of production machines. Please describe your auditing services. We have evolved to the point that we are no longer a sales and service company, but a solutions company. We are comparing our equipment to others with less frequency. Our focus has always been to make our customers problems our problem. We need to know more about their air system and usage needs then they do and solving their problems is our main focus. Before auditing became popular, Comp-Air Service Co. had this focus. We have been in this mode for many years. We always had a systems approach and provided systems solution. In the past, Larry would do the walk-through and now, with air audits, we provide better documentation of what we’ve been doing for all these years. How do you measure flow, kW and leaks? We use amp loggers and pressure loggers extended all the way out in the plant and internally on production equipment. They are independent and self-contained with an e-prom memory. On amp draw we work on mean averages. Flow meters are normally intrusive, forcing you to slice into a header or a pipe. For flow measurement, we prefer to amp log a machine and determine what percentage load it is running at. We then back into the flow number by comparing load to full-load capacity data published by the compressor manufacturer. We do remote monitoring with some clients like Tropicana and Southern Peru Copper. We find customers with remote locations and with strong technical departments have a preference for remote monitoring. How significant are the air leaks you encounter in your audits? We just finished auditing four factories of a major multinational corporation. They were all at over 50% leak rates of installed horsepower. This corporation has taken a very aggressive Kaizen approach to driving down energy costs globally. They shut down the entire factory on Sunday and allow auditing teams to analyze various systems in the facility in a “at rest” condition with no production load on the equipment. We could load up the machines and run them and find out how much was required to simply supply the air leaks. We would then see the system ramping up on Monday, running full bore on Tuesday, and we would turn in our Kaizen results on the compressed air system on Wednesday. This company is auditing every plant they have globally in this manner. Being able to audit a facility in a “at rest” condition and then compare it to full production conditions absolutely provides us with the best possible situation to provide a perfect audit. w ww.a irbestprac tic es. com a cc . 41 http://www.airbestpractices.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Compressed Air Best Practices - January 2008

Compressed Air Best Practices - January 2008 Contents Focus Industry Features Compressed Air Industry Articles From the Editor Real World Best Practices: Selecting A VSD Rotary Compressor Audit of the Month: Energy Savings in Peru The Low-Hanging Fruit in Pneumatic Systems Mikropor America, Inc. Wireless Sensor Networks: Improve Efficiency in Compressed Air Systems Special Report: The Chicago Pneumatic Compressor Launch in North America The Importance of Measuring Vacuum The Comp-Air Service Co. Special Report: The 2007 NAACD Wall Street Watch Advertiser Index Job Market

Compressed Air Best Practices - January 2008

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