A Super, Sonic Way To Save Money

It costs money to use compressed air ... so a friend who is an experienced engineer tells me. Apparently, there's a recognised cost per m3 of compressed air and it's use can become very expensive on an industrial scale. In fact, according to Wikipedia a staggering 10% of all electricity used by industry in Europe is for the production of compressed air!

On reading more about sonic soot blowers, sonic horns or acoustic cleaners (whatever you choose to call them!) I realised that they require compressed air in their operation. So I wondered if that might be a disadvantage to them being used as an alternative to soot blowers.

I did a little research .... I looked at a variety of sonic soot blower/sonic horn suppliers and compared their approach to the installation/operation of their equipment. Fascinating stuff!

Why? Because whilst all types of sonic soot blowers use the same principle of operation - ie. the compressed air is used to sound the horns at intervals in order to stop material build-up - they vary in the number of times they are sounded, the intervals at which they sound and the duration of each sound blast.

Let's imagine for a moment an example of a boiler in a power generation plant where the management is considering having sonic soot blowers installed. (I chose this example because both sonic soot blowers and standard soot blowers are used widely for cleaning power plant boilers).

One supplier I came across prefers the route of installing multiple sonic horns (let's say 20), all set up to sound together at the same time. Another supplier I came across suggests the same number of horns (20) BUT prefers to have them set up to sound separately (at 6 minute intervals).

If you compare these two examples, the second option would require far less compressed air and a smaller generator than the first option. So their horns, once installed, should operate more cheaply.

However, it doesn't end there because I discovered a third supplier who goes a step further ... their horns, whilst sounding at the same intervals as the second supplier's, are designed to sound for less time and yet be still as effective. So that equates to yet another saving on compressed air whilst retaining optimum efficiency. Clever stuff!

To learn more about this fascinating field of industrial science read:

• cleaning power plant boilers 
• the technical side of sonic soot blowing (Knol article by Donald F Cameron)