Fluidics is an interesting discipline of physics. Air, in particular, can be made to behave quite peculiarly by flowing it across a solid surface. Consider the EXAIR Standard and Full Flow Air Knives:
If you’ve ever used a leaf blower, or rolled down the car window while traveling at highway speed, you’re familiar with the power of a high velocity air flow. Now consider that the Coanda effect can cause such a drastic redirection of this kind of air flow, and that’s a prime example of just how interesting the science of fluidics can be.
EXAIR Air Amplifiers, Air Wipes, and Super Air Nozzles also employ the Coanda effect to entrain air, and the Super Air Knife employs similar precision engineered surfaces to optimize entrainment, resulting in a 40:1 amplification ratio:
As fascinating as all that is, the entrainment of air that these products employ contributes to another principle of fluidics: the creation of a boundary layer. In addition to the Coanda effect causing the fluid to follow the path of the surface it’s flowing past, the flow is also affected in direct proportion to its velocity, and inversely by its viscosity, in the formation of a boundary layer.
This laminar, lower velocity boundary layer travels with the primary air stream as it discharges from the EXAIR products shown above. In addition to amplifying the total developed flow, it also serves to attenuate the sound level of the higher velocity primary air stream. This makes EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Products not only as efficient as possible in regard to their use of compressed air, but as quiet as possible as well.
If you’d like to find out more about how the science behind our products can improve your air consumption, give me a call.