5 Manufacturing Applications Where Modular Industrial Air Filtration Benefits the Bottom Line

In any industrial setting, cleanliness is essential to ensuring production quality and reducing operating costs. Whether you’re sanding a boat, manufacturing a jet engine, or finishing an MRAP, dust and other airborne particles can settle into every nook and cranny of your large, complex components. Tiny particulates can contaminate bolts, rivets, or screws and endanger equipment performance.

When time is money, modular industrial air filtration can shield your small and large-scale operations from damaging particulates and prevent costly do-overs and rework. When engineered to accommodate your unique facility requirements and production processes, these clean air solutions can control capital expenses and protect employees from indoor airborne hazards.

Here are five applications where modular industrial air filtration can not only meet EHS compliance, but also contribute to a healthy manufacturing bottom line.

Enabling Cost-Effective Cellular Manufacturing

Most people associate cellular manufacturing with lean processes to reduce waste and streamline production flow. But, if you manufacture parts and machinery for the military, automotive, aerospace, or marine industries, you’re well aware that one-piece flow isn’t as simple as it sounds.

With cellular manufacturing, you must quickly initiate painting or other short-term production tasks while waiting on a long-term construction. When air filtration is portable, you can focus on contamination control where and when it’s needed, for reduced processing time and improved part quality.

Portable industrial air filtration brings clean air to the workpiece, with cellular manufacturing benefits such as:

• Enables crane access and reduces the need to move large pieces for sanding, blasting, painting, or other finishing processes
• Reconfigures easily to suit changing product requirements and on-the-fly scheduling adjustments
• Minimizes the transport distance between successive steps in one-piece-flow
• Reduces handling, queuing time, and waste, while improving employee productivity and workpiece visibility
• Enables multiple operations within a clean air enclosure and allows for easy filter swap out and cleaning between processes

Shielding CNC Machining Processes

From seat and galley components to lighting systems and avionics, CNC parts machining can produce aluminum dust particles and oil mist that can settle into your expensive robotics and inflict significant wear and tear on your equipment. In large concentrations, aluminum dust can even become combustible, putting your entire operations at risk.

Fortunately, modular industrial air filtration systems can be engineered to capture aluminum dust and oil mist particles at their source, with flexible designs that work with any existing manufacturing cell.

Modular industrial air filtration delivers bottom-line CNC machining benefits such as:

• Isolating the machinery in a clean air envelope, so equipment is impervious to dust and mist particulates
• Capturing mist at its source and storing collected oil or other fluids for reuse or disposal
• Reducing the time needed to perform machine maintenance and increasing equipment lifespan

Solving Aluminum Finishing Clean Air Challenges

Engines, propulsion systems, and smaller aluminum parts often require powder coating, plating, or other surface preparation before painting. Chrome plated surface coatings produce toxic Hex Chromates or chromated primers that can endanger worker health and invite OSHA and EPA fines if not properly contained. These coatings are also vulnerable to dust, which can inhibit surface bonding.

Modular air filtration can capture nearly 100 percent of these airborne particulates and VOCs with cross air drafts that reduce dry times without the use of drying agents, heaters, or blowers.

Customizable for specific finishing operations, modular air filtration provides:

• Portable, retractable clean air rooms that can be easily stored away between surface prep and painting processes
• Tapered airflow that wicks away contaminated air through multiple stages of filtration and discharges clean air back into the shop
• Cubic feet per minute (CFM) conditions that are well below the 25 percent low explosion limit per the ANSI Z9.7 as required by the NFPA33 Chapter 7.5.2.

Creating Optimal Testing Conditions

Many manufacturers use nondestructive testing and prototyping as part of their quality control and research and development, which often involves producing parts in limited numbers throughout the shop. Conventional, dedicated clean air spaces are not cost-effective for cellular production at low volumes and don’t provide the necessary humidity and clean air control for intermittent adhesive applications or coatings.

Modular industrial air filtration can be engineered to create climate-controlled clean rooms that are portable and ISO compliant enough for even the toughest R&D requirements. These clean air solutions isolate testing processes from other parts of manufacturing, keeping contaminants out and maintaining optimal conditions inside.

Air filtration provides R&D benefits such as:

• Controls air particulates and gaseous contaminants that can compromise testing quality
• Provides precise temperature and humidity ranges required for specific adhesives
• Frees more shop floor space that can be used for ongoing production while testing proceeds in the climate-controlled clean room

Ensuring Safe, Compliant Welding

Welding produces some of the most serious indoor fumes in manufacturing, including metals like chromium, manganese, nickel and zinc, as well as argon, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen fluoride gases. Together these particles and gases form a “smoke” that can impair breathing or cause nausea, dizziness, or irritate the eyes, nose, and throat.

Containing these airborne threats not only protects against OSHA fines, but ensures a healthy, error-free working environment. But PPE doesn’t protect against all air hazards and the equipment can impede worker performance. Dedicated enclosures require expensive, high-maintenance HVAC systems and take up valuable floor space.

With modular industrial air filtration, weld fumes and smoke particles are effectively extracted to shield workers whenever and wherever needed.

These fume extraction units are ideally suited for operations such as:

• Resistance Welding: Spot and seam welding processes that produce particularly toxic metal particulates
• Robotic Welding: AI machines produce higher volumes of hexavalent chromium and other fumes than manual welding, as the arc stays in operation much longer
• Laser Welding: Lasers use extreme temperatures that produce smaller air particulates that are more easily inhaled by employees

Additionally, modular air filtration eliminates fumes that can interfere with the welding arc or beam. In clean, contaminant-free air, welding produces more efficient and precise results.

Disruption-Free Manufacturing with Modular Industrial Air Filtration

If your operations depend on flexible, cellular manufacturing, Duroair’s modular industrial air filtration can provide flexible, cost-effective indoor contamination control when and where you need it.

Combining retractable enclosures with vented and non-vented filtration, Duroair engineers custom clean air solutions that work with existing floor spaces and cellular processes. Each solution is designed for on-demand workflows to reduce processing times and ongoing operating costs and improve production quality.

To learn how we can engineer a clean air solution to better both your work environment and your bottom line, contact Duroair today.