A Tale Of Two Cooling Applications

There are many, many ways to cool something down. Which method works best will depend on a number of factors, but the biggies are:

*How hot is it?
*How cool do you need it?

If you call EXAIR to discuss a cooling application, these are most likely the first questions that’ll be asked. And the answers will determine which product line we start talking about. In the title of this blog, I promised you two tales…here’s the first:

A caller from a metal fabricating shop needed to cool down metal cylinders after they were heated to 400F, and was curious to know if this was a good application for one of our products. Now, he had already answered one of our questions, so the answer to the second would tell the rest of the tale.

Turns out, they only needed to get down to 120F or so, which made this an excellent application for our Super Air Knives…they’re going to blow a laminar, high volume flow of ambient temperature air onto the part. We knew this from a past application that was so well documented that we included it in our catalog…you can read all about it on page 21 (if you don’t have one, get one – it’s free.) But for now, here’s a graph of the cooling rate comparison with the Super Air Knife:

While the fans no doubt made for high volume air movement, it was also very turbulent.  The laminar flow of the Super Air Knife resulted in a much faster heat transfer rate.

When I showed this to the caller, that was all the convincing it took…their goal was to reach 120F in about a minute and a half.  Which, as you can see, will be no problem for the Super Air Knife.

Tale #2 is a bit different.  This was from a firearms manufacturer who needed to cool small, but hot, parts quickly, and they needed to reach room temperature.  Looking at the graph above, we know that blowing room temperature air on a hot part will cool it rapidly, until the temperature of the part begins to approach room temperature.  The solution?  Colder air, of course!

Enter the EXAIR Vortex Tube…after some discussion of the part size, shape, and their compressed air capacity, we determined the Model 3215 Medium Vortex Tube should be suitable for their operation.  By generating a cold air flow of about 20F, this replicated the higher temperature differential we see in the left-hand side of the cooling graph above…where the cooling rate was the highest.

If you’d like to talk about how “cool” an EXAIR product can make your application, give me a call.

Russ Bowman
Application Engineer
EXAIR Corporation
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