Stephen Riley, general manager of Beko Technologies, takes a look at some of the changes that have occurred in the world of compressed air and explains why he believes measuring devices have a key role to play in managing both the quantity and quality of compressed air. Some 30 to 40 years ago the salesperson selling compressed air generation and treatment equipment had very few tools at his disposal. Many systems were over-sized because there was no low cost means of deciding the size of the system. Educated guesswork was the order of the day. The only scientific way to determine component sizes was to note all equipment consuming compressed air and then observe the cycles or take a usage factor, ie if using a drill it is unlikely that the drill would be in constant use as the hole would normally be drilled to insert a bolt. Even doing this usually led to a calculation which would oversize a system because the biggest sin would be to not have a system with adequate capacity. Air quality was poor relative to today. Filter manufacturers were focussing on sterile air and process filters rather than the new kid on the block – compressed air. Dryer manufacturers were making fridge dryers with no great attention to power consumption or pressure drop and desiccant dryers were selected on capital cost rather than running costs resulting in more ‘heatless’ dryers purchased but wasting up to 20% of compressed air through purge loss. Several things were to impact the world of industry: The rising costs of fossil fuels and the increasing awareness of ozone depletion by refrigerant gases and other contaminants. This drove manufacturers to focus on reducing energy costs. The compressed air industry came up with variable speed drive options, zero loss drains, zero purge and heat of compression dryers and intelligent controllers. There are others but, in my opinion, these are the significant ones which reduce consumers’ energy costs. At the same time plant engineering staff became more focussed on tackling waste. Leakage became a big issue; many sites discovered that their leakage rate was more than 20% and that a well maintained site would be about 10%. This waste was significant, even when large sites were only paying £0.03/Kwh. BEKO Technologies initial contribution to this paradigm shift was the Bekomat, level sensing, zero loss drain. More than 1.5 million devices have been sold and the design engineering people in BEKO and elsewhere were all looking for the next advancement in cost reduction and efficiency. BEKO believed that all foreseeable developments in generation and treatment of compressed air would be tweaks unless a quantum change happened. This was thought unlikely because of physics. For example, take a big cost saver, the heat of compression type dryers. What has changed is not the physics, but the fact that energy is no longer wasted; it is used to regenerate the desiccant. BEKO decided that its strategy for the ‘next big thing’ would be to diversify into measurement while not losing sight of its core business in compressed air treatment. The belief is that customers would want more opportunity to manage and control their systems with the minimum operating costs. BEKO believed that more companies would need to measure the flow, leakage, pressure dew point, pressure and oil and particulate content of their compressed air. The company now has a wide range of user-friendly measurement devices. One of its most interesting developments is the Metpoint OCV which measures remaining oil vapour content in compressed air down to 0.003 mg/m3. The affordable device gives instant results in real time and has the levels of connectivity required in today’s information-hungry world. In the past to get close to this products’ capability was either expensive or meant passing air across absorbent material and sending away for spectroscopic analysis. The problem with this is that the results are history. If the reading was bad, what about the litres of beverage, thousands of pills, tins of food that had been produced during the time period? BEKO Technologies has also produced a portable version currently only available as a service product. BEKO will send a technician with the Metpoint OCV and accessories and measure multiple points on site. This avoids expensive capital costs on a site where multiple readings would be required. This facility had recently been taken up by a major pharmaceutical company which was happy to find out that the upgrades it had made to its compressed air system were giving the ISO Class 1 standard for oil content that it was looking for. The client plans to purchase several measuring devices as a result of his satisfaction with the site tests, connectivity and user friendliness. Until there is a significant change in how compressed air is generated and treated, BEKO Technologies believes customers will get the most value out of managing and controlling both the quantity and quality of their compressed air systems. If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.
