How Hazard Containment Flexibility Is a Competitive Advantage

How much could you improve productivity if you could bring clean-air workstations to every component and workpiece — even for multiple stages of assembly and maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO)? Duroair’s clean-air solutions do exactly that, with flexible hazard-containment workstations that are equipped with our end-to-end industrial air filtration systems. It’s a new, flexible approach to safe, clean manufacturing that offers a clear competitive advantage.

In this blog, we’ll share examples of how Duroair’s hazard containment solutions provide the flexibility to save MRO time and expense, while meeting your indoor air quality (IAQ) requirements.

The ROI Benefits of Flexible Hazard Containment

Airborne particulate — from toxic cutting, grinding, and sanding dust to hexavalent chromium and VOCs released during coating and painting — is particularly challenging for manufacturers to contain. Traditional, permanent enclosures and clean rooms can help meet environmental health and safety (EHS) regulations, but they take up valuable facility footprints, time, and resources to install. And outsourcing MRO surface prep work and painting can cost millions in production cycle delays.

Fortunately, Duroair™ offers flexible hazard-containment solutions, such as our DuroPure™ industrial air filtration that pairs with a modular DuroRoom™ enclosure to provide the same safety benefits of a permanent workstation while saving time and expense.

These ROI benefits include:

• Reduce material handling costs: For industries like aerospace and aviation, transporting colossal engines and components is costly. Duroair workstations are available with retractable enclosures that allow you to bring clean air to each workpiece without material handling delays on the shop floor.
• Perform simultaneous maintenance and repairs: Instead of having to sand, then paint, then coat, Duroair multipurpose booths allow your teams to complete all three stages at once on three different workpieces. Each booth can be customized for up to three chambers, to suit whatever work you need done at that moment in time.
• Minimize MRO setup times: In operations where high-mix, low-volume (HMVL) workflows are in constant flux, it simply takes too much time to set up maintenance and repairs in a permanent workstation. Duroair systems are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice and can retract to 20% of their extended length for easy storage.
• Ensure safety and equipment reliability: Toxic dust and fumes produced during surface prep can threaten employee health and even aircraft equipment failure if surface coatings don’t cure completely. Duroair’s multipurpose booths stop particulate from interfering during painting and coating, safeguarding employees and protecting aircraft from corrosion.
• Improve work quality, increase throughput: No matter your industry, a safe, controlled environment is key to employee performance. When employees know they’re in a safe, clean-air environment, they’re less likely to make mistakes, and productivity increases.

5 Ways Flexible Hazard Containment Provides a Competitive Edge

The more flexibility you have to reduce inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your MRO workflows, the bigger your competitive advantage. Duroair’s softwall, retractable booths, and our modular, hardwall enclosures both work with industrial air filtration to provide this flexibility for operations that need controlled work environments in days, not months.

Here are five ways our customizable hazard-containment systems can give you a leg up on the competition.

1. Increase Operational Efficiency

While investing in new clean-air technologies requires an upfront cost, it can lower total the cost of ownership by removing production inefficiencies and reducing up-front capital expenditures through downstream improvements.

For example, controlled airflow technology can dramatically increase painting and coating efficiency. Permanent paint booths traditionally feature downdraft or crossdraft airflow technologies, both of which have limitations in improving dry times, controlling overspray, and preventing particulate contamination. Alternatively, Duroair’s retractable spray booths use patented Taper-Draft airflow technology to create an airflow envelope around the workpiece rather than directing air into or across the paint.

This increases throughput by accelerating drying, so each unit spends less time in the booth. The more controlled airflow also ensures more paint reaches the surface rather than being drawn away by turbulence. Consequently, overspray, rework, and paint consumption are reduced while quality improves.

2. Improve R&D Capabilities

Industrial air filtration can have a huge impact on prototyping, assembly, and research and development (R&D). Whether working with metal, 3D printed polymers, or advanced composites, the byproduct is dust. Localized extraction systems will capture some particulates, but there’s generally a need for PPE and post-finishing cleaning, which can lengthen the assembly process and lead to costly project delays.

A flexible, end-to-end, air filtration solution can be customized by Duroair to integrate into an existing manufacturing environment to mitigate these problems. Particulate-laden air is continuously replaced by clean air, so workers are better protected and surfaces stay free from contamination. And because the clean-air enclosure can be brought to the R&D component versus the other way around, the assembly process gains efficiencies that keep the project on track.

3. Reduce Material Handling

It takes a great deal of material handling to move workpieces by crane through crowded manufacturing shops and into clean rooms, surface prep areas, or spray booths. Man-hours are spent making the move and are possibly lost due to distraction and disruption.

Material handling can also lead to accidental workpiece damage as surfaces are marked or scratched, hands are put in the wrong place, and small projections get knocked or caught. Consequently, accidental damage leads to additional rework before the product can ship.

A portable, flexible, hazard containment solution can reduce and even eliminate the need to move large workpieces into and out of dedicated areas. A good example is the use of a retractable spray booth.

Large fabrications and assemblies often need paint or other coatings after welding. Locating a retractable booth off to one side in a fabrication shop avoids the need to move a workpiece into a dedicated facility. Instead, an enclosure is placed around the workpiece, creating an atmospherically-controlled work environment that adapts to the process and reduces material handling time, disruption, and risk.

4. Optimize Factory Layout and Utilization

For manufacturing and assembling storage tanks, military vehicles, and airframes, it’s common to build-in-place. However, clean room assembly, surface preparation, and painting and coating are usually carried out in dedicated locations to meet requirements for effluent management, noise abatement, and effective air management. Forklift trucks, gantry cranes, and wide aisles are needed to accommodate these permanent enclosures, resulting in a bigger factory that’s not making the most efficient use of space.

A modular or portable air filtration solution permits a complete restructuring of common workspace organization practices. Rather than painstakingly moving large assemblies into and out of dedicated areas, the equipment can come to the product, and a true build-in-place product layout can be realized. Plus, with a retractable workstation, downtime for MRO setup/breakdown is reduced, thanks to a workstation that can be deployed when and where it’s needed. 

This also reduces lean waste in terms of facility layout when a facility is designed from the outset to use portable air filtration solutions. Instead of allocating floor space for dedicated operations that may experience low utilization, an on-demand air filtration solution can be deployed and put in place as needed.

5. Increase In-House Capabilities and Profitability

As we noted earlier, outsourcing certain coating and finishing processes can cost valuable production lead time. Packaging and transporting large or bulky products on- and off-site can add days or weeks to production schedules, which extends delivery dates and increases inventory, transportation, and handling costs. Over time, these costs can add up to millions of dollars.

While bringing MRO capabilities in-house undoubtedly incurs up-front costs, in-house processing with the right technology and smarter work practices can lead to definitive bottom-line benefits. Portable hazard containment and industrial air filtration offer a cost-effective option for manufacturers to establish in-house, temporary environments for specialized processes that can be deployed over the product only when required. This also reduces quality control risks, such as the inability to assess outsourced production against relevant standards until the product or workpiece returns for inspection.

Let Duroair Help You Increase Profitability With Clean-Air Flexibility

In order to stay competitive, manufacturers must look beyond regulatory air quality compliance to the bottom-line benefits from a customized, flexible, hazard containment solution. A portable or modular enclosure with an industrial air filtration system that is aligned to the unique specifications of both facility layout and production workflows can dramatically increase efficiency across key operational areas. 

For example, the non-vented, six-stage, DuroPure industrial air filtration technology for aerospace and defense contractors captures more than 99% of particulates and exceeds EPA and OSHA requirements. Yet when paired with a DuroRoom enclosure, this clean-air system costs less to build than a traditional workstation, which requires a permanent footprint and venting, which can be costly, especially if a facility is at its EPA limit for exhaust stacks.

Our Duroair clean-air experts can show you how these and other tailored technologies can increase operational efficiencies and overall profitability, from optimal space utilization to improved productivity through an overall compression of the manufacturing process. 

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. We’ll provide an expert evaluation of your plant to find an industrial air filtration solution and hazard containment system that will meet your budget, comply with EHS requirements, and maximize productivity.