Air Treatment
Did you get the auto-drain installed in your receiver yet?
I hope you have, or at the very least, you are draining the receiver manually a couple of times a day in the plant, and at the end of every day of use in the home workshop.
You see, the fastest and most economical way to get water out of your air system is to drain it at the source, the receiver / air tank.
After all, a 250 HP compressor will generate about 80,000 gallons of free water a year. You don't want that water flowing into your compressed air system air mains.
Drain The Receiver / Air Tank
Much of your down-stream air treatment equipment could be either over taxed or rendered useless if the compressor tank is not drained regularly.Put your hand on the receiver / tank after your compressor has been running a while and feel the temperature. If the receiver is warm, and it stays warm or hot all the time you're using air, you are actually generating warm, water-vapor laden air that will ultimately send water from the compressor tank to all the places in your air system where you d not want water to be... ever!
To make draining the receiver most effective the cooler the air is in there, the more water will drop out of the compressed air in the tank. This is water which you can eliminate from your system by opening the drain manually or let the your auto-drain void from the tank as it cycles, and this is water that will not get to your air tools or air valves and cylinders.
Maybe A Larger Receiver?
Consider adding a larger receiver as a passive air cooler. The larger tank does mean that your compressor will run longer to fill the added air space, yet it will also mean that you'll have more "dwell time" in the receiver for the air to cool naturally, before the compressor kicks in on demand for higher pressure. If the air can cool enough to reach it's dew point it will condense into free water which can be drained right at the receiver.If you've high demand on your compressor, consider adding a second receiver tank plumbed quite a distance from the first, to allow the air to cool naturally as it flows to the second tank.
In fact, if your extra compressor receiver was placed on the other side of the plant, and you ran your main air lines from the first compressor receiver up to the ceiling and around both sides of the plant, you'd have a "ring" supply of compressed air, which is the highest recommended method of plumbing air throughout a plant.
You will have to take into account where and what the demand for your air is and ensure that the added plumbing doesn't "starve" any application. By having that second receiver installed, you can manually drain the first tank daily, auto-drain the second automatically a number of times each day, and remove substantial amounts of water at the receivers rather than later down-stream where the water can cause you problems. If it were us installing two, plant wide receivers, we would install an auto drain in both receivers just so we wouldn't have to worry about the manually drained receiver being forgotten and filling up with condensate.
The second receiver offers an alternate, energy-consumption-free method of naturally cooling air from your compressor.
If your compressed air travels from the first receiver to the second without being used by any appliance, then - immediately after your secondary receiver - and before the air gets to any of your in-plant applications, install a general purpose filter sized for the expected demand of the plant.
Remember, depending on the size and capacity of your receiver, the general purpose filter must have the flow capacity of the total CFM flow demand of your plant, not just what the compressor output is rated for. If it's possible for all air consuming devices in your plant to come on at the same time, that's the flow that will be moving through the first filter.
Space being available, we would install that first general purpose filter right at the tank, and then a second one as far away from my last receiver as we could, to allow air flowing to it from the receiver to naturally cool in the longer flow path, allowing more water to condense and be removed.
There are many additional steps that can be taken to remove water from your compressed air, each one usually more complex and costing more in up-front purchase, and energy consumed to operate them.
The intent here is to give you options that allow you to improve water removal in your system to a level that suits your needs, at the lowest possible cost.
Not everyone needs air that's dessert dry, and since it costs a small fortune to get larger quantities of compressed air that dry, you will not want to do so if your plant applications don't require it.
Compressed Air Treatment is continued here.
