Is It Time to Replace or Repair Your Compressor
It is hard to comprehend the health of your air compressor and estimate its ability to perform and knowing when you upgrade can be a game of guesswork. Your industrial air compressor will run at full capacity for longer cycles, with minimal downtime in perfect working conditions. But, a great deal of effort and technique goes into this with various guidelines acting as metrics to determine the condition of the air compressor and its lifespan.
Proper maintenance is critical because compressor failure can lead to costly and time-consuming repairs and increased downtime. Especially when production has to run every day of the year, the loss of an industrial compressor can result in expensive unwanted downtime for your business. At the same time, inefficiency due to age of the system – higher maintenance intervals or energy consumption, or loss from pressure drops or frequent load/ unload cycles, or unexpected breakdowns can result in significant loss of time and profit on the shop floor.
Timely and thorough maintenance of the compressors ensure maximum unit uptime and increase efficiency and productivity. Keeping the compressor in the recommended operational conditions with minimum free spacing around the units and clean room will aid in the control of temperatures and ensure smoother operations.
What factors determine upgrading or replacing your compressors?
Age of the machine
One main reason to consider replacement of your compressors is its age. On average, Atlas Copco improves the energy efficiency of its compressors by 1% annually. We know energy cost makes up the largest share of compressor’s total cost of ownership!
You would want the most efficient system running on your production floor to improve your business’s profitability.
Flow profile distribution – VSD a must
We all know adding a Variable Speed Drive (VSD) compressor to your installation adapts to realistic flow demand fluctuation as would be practical for any factory or utility for operation. This avoids frequent load / unload on Fixed Speed compressors resulting in savings of 35% on energy – wasted power and reduced wear-and-tear on the compressors.
The largest opportunity for savings!
Energy savings impact 80% of the total Life Cycle Cost over a 10 year period of the compressor by directly saving on the customer’s yearly energy bill.
Centralization
Compressed air network for a typical factory can consist of multiple of compressors. Having all these machines in a centralized room can help select the most efficient compressor combination to support your operation in the narrowest possible pressure band. A smart sequence controller like Optimizer 4.0 can be utilized for this with auto-sequencing functionality, guaranteeing the optimized performance of complete station. We can have a combination of old and newer units where running hours can be balanced, ensure back-up units, and bring down the maintenance cost as well. On top, remote control and monitoring is a valuable feature addition – and all of this can be made possible within a small overall footprint, thanks to centralization.
Cost of repairs
The older the compressor, the more often it requires maintenance, and these maintenance costs can quickly increase. If the cost of repairs and frequency of maintenance intervals is on the rise – in general service cost adding up to 50% and above of a new compressor, then it’s not wise to continue spending on repairs.
With replacing you reduce on your risk of unexpected breakdowns, save on energy as newer units are more efficient in power and compact, and spend less as well on maintaining these units – lowest life cycle cost approach.
With less consumption of spare parts, your own inventories are light, with less wastage of oil, filters, other consumables and thereby reducing your carbon footprint in addition to the money saved.
Air quality
Quality matters when it comes to clean and efficient compressed air. And this is because the intake air is never totally clean and because many compressors use oil or other lubricants to generate compressed air, which may include dust, moisture and oil particles.
Having the right compressor for your application – Oil-free or Oil-injected with necessary filtration and more importantly a suitable drying technology is going to be a huge pay off.
For applications like Food & Beverage or Pharmaceutical, choosing Oil-free compressors that are Class 0 as per ISO 8673-1 is the correct way forward.
Likewise, a range of drying technologies are available to select based on correct dewpoint needed for the application and energy efficiency. Zero purge with negligible power consumption is rotary drum adsorption dryers which can come as integrated or standalone units to achieve dew points as low as –40 degC.
-> Read the application story from Oman Pharmaceutical Product
ISO 8573-1 2010 air quality classes table
System inefficiencies – calls for air audit
There can be several reasons favoring a replacement of your compressors. Before buying that new state-of-the-art compressor technology – Rotary Screw or Centrifugal or Reciprocating, take a moment to scan your existing downstream system. Inefficiencies can be worthwhile to identify first and at times are simply fixable problems.
Unnecessary pressure drop across a system is huge wastage of money as every 1 bar extra to compress is approx. 7% more energy.
One way to address this accurately is commissioning an energy audit with Atlas Copco’s iiTrak data loggers and AIRScan audit with capabilities to measure your installation’s critical parameters – like flow, energy, pressure and leak detection. Highlighting immediate improvement from leak detection and unwanted pressure drop from ancillary equipment is valuable to maintain overall well performing system.
Benefits of AIRScan
And why is it essential?
Upgrading air compressor deserves special attention; if left unattended, the compressor continues to run and consume energy without producing compressed air.
The size and material used for a compressed air distribution system can be critical to ensure adequate flow and pressure delivery at the most remote area of contact. When air leaks from the compressed air system, the pneumatics or tool performance is reduced, and operations become less efficient. Lower pressure at the point of use is considered a loss of compressed air. It can lead to inefficiency and causes the compressor to run longer and harder trying to maintain system pressure.
Regular and preventive maintenance on the air compressors significantly adds to the machine’s lifespan and ensures a cost-effective run. Timely monitoring of your system should always be maintained, to highlight and address any inefficiencies within the system and take informed decision on air compressor upgrade.
In some cases, it’s hard to pinpoint the factors that are affecting the performance of air compressors, but with AIRScan auditing and iiTrak dataloggers, our teams can have an in-dept analysis on your installation and detect issues to be addressed immediately – whether it is leakage on piping, pressure drop on network or saturation of filters or even inefficient downstream drying equipment.
How we help
Atlas Copco is a leader in productivity solutions. It evaluates industry operations and can provide a detailed analysis report of the current operational system. Based on the usage metrics and data received from the equipment we create a detailed report stating key factors that allow clients to decide on the most optimal solution to meet the requirements. For your free AIRScan audit, please feel free to Contact Us.
If upfront financial cost to replace is something you wish to discuss, please ask about Lease to Own Plan that we can offer, check out the detail here.