Compressed air audits & assessments
August 18th 2008 You have a lot riding on the health of your compressed air system. If even a single aspect or component of your system is compromised, you risk production inefficiencies and stoppages, extended downtime, even product liability due to spoilage. Unfortunately, many companies are unaware of how well their air systems are working. Furthermore, when problems do exist within a system, it’s usually the symptoms that are dealt with, rather than the causes.
That’s where Ingersoll Rand can help
A doctor wouldn’t write a prescription without first making a diagnosis. That’s malpractice. Similarly, in terms of compressed air, fixing a troublesome system without knowing the true problem is a hit or miss proposition based on guesswork. In your business, you can ill afford to guess with regulatory requirements and quality assurance standards on the line. Ingersoll Rand eliminates the guesswork by providing proven air system auditing & assessment services that:
- Define
- Measure
- Analyse
- Improve
- Control
You may recognize that these are the principle steps of Six Sigma.
Define
The audit is carried out as a visual exercise based on a defined list of key actions none of which require any measurements to be undertaken. The key actions to be undertaken shall be agreed between the auditor and the compressed air system user.
The objective of the audit (walk-round survey) shall be agreed and then it will be determined whether an assessment is required.
We try to establish your air system life cycle cost and what needs to be done to improve this. If you are not sure where you want to go there are a million and one ways of getting there. The in briefing and audit defines the goals.
Measure
You cannot fix something until you quantify the problem with data. This is an accurate assessment of your plants compressed air demand over a 7-day cycle. The level of measurement is outlined in 3 categories.
Category A assessment
- data logging utilising our IntelliSurvey
- intrusive pressure and current measurement
- calculated flow
- basic air quality testing with detector tubes (if required)
- leak detection (using non-electronic means)
- mechanical and reliability assessment
This assessment generally will not require your compressed air system to be shut down.
Category B assessment
This increases the sophistication of the assessment, with more intrusive measurements.
- data logging on electrical supply to one or more compressors to show power consumed in kW
- temperature, pressure & flow measurement utilizing insertion mass flow meters that can be hot tapped
- leak detection (using hand-held ultrasonic leak detectors)
Category C assessment
The category B steps plus:
- data logging of multiple installations
- multiple pressure & flow measurements
- air quality (if required)
Analyse
Using logged information a comprehensive report is complied and analysed. We search for the route cause of a problem from the defined reported symptoms. The report includes costs analysis, graphs, life cycle projections and a priority action plan of implementation recommendations for improving the systems performance. This is in terms of productivity, reliabilty and energy efficiency . Basically how much extra profit you can add to your bottom line.
Improve
The prescribed recommendation could include……….
- Better control of demand side pressure to reduce artificial demand
- Leak management to reduce waste
- System automation which can avoid false starting of compressors
- Increased capacitance to slow down rate of change of pressure
- New equipment
- Performance and reliability based maintenance program
Control
Ingersoll Rand will determine the effectiveness of the solution by a validation assessment. We encourage you to build a level of audit and assessment into your maintenance program. This is to ensure continuous improvement is always on the agenda. More articles from Ingersoll Rand Industrial Technologies: | 
