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Airblast Installs New Sound-Attenuated Blast Room For Conquip
Client
Location
Alton, UK
Brief
Design, manufacture and install a sound-attenuated blast room to reduce ambient factory noise.
Background
Conquip is one of the UK’s leading engineering and manufacturing companies – designing and fabricating construction equipment, such as digger buckets, platforms, and excavation support systems. In November 2020, Conquip sought to improve production throughput by installing a blast facility at their HQ in Alton. After comparing industry leaders in blast room manufacture, Conquip chose Airblast, known globally for their technically excellent surface treatment solutions.
Conquip briefed Airblast on what they required: a 12m long, 6m wide, and a 4.17m high sound-attenuated blast room that offered the best possible performance. Based on their exacting specifications, our team set to design a fully comprehensive surface treatment solution.
The Solution
In typical operation, blast rooms can be especially noisy. Sound attenuated blast rooms offer improved noise control and Airblast’s sound-attenuated blast rooms are constructed from lightweight sound-insulated panels, reducing operational noise. Studies have shown that lowering factory noise levels can help improve focus and factory safety. Anecdotally, companies have seen upwards of 20 dB breakout noise reduction, however, it is notoriously difficult for predicting or modelling noise reduction because of all the variable parameters affecting sound.
We recommended and installed one of our own bespoke 200ltr pressure hold blast machines for the most optimal performance. Pressure hold blast machines offer greater cost savings than traditional blast machines; they utilise 20% more abrasive while in operation and reduce component wear. Pressure hold units achieve this by an innovative deadman system. This system prevents blast media pooling in the blast hose, which would form a slug of abrasive that, upon startup, would prematurely wear the hose, nozzle, and waste abrasive.
For the abrasive recovery system, we installed the Airflex recovery floor system. The Airflex recovery floor is the most efficient way to feed reclaimable abrasive media back to the blast pot for use. The Airflex recovery floor system works by collecting abrasive that falls through the grated floor of the blast room into channels, where it is automatically swept to a collection pit. Then, abrasive in the pit scooped by a traversal elevator passes through a grit wash where reclaimable media is sent to the blast machine for use and spent abrasive, and other contaminants are sent to a collection bin. While this innovation increases productivity by cutting out manual abrasive recovery, it also prevents the dust extraction unit cartridges from being damaged by large particulate contaminants. As a result, it improves the operational longevity of the cartridge and avoids costly repair bills.
We used the most powerful and comprehensive unit on the market for dust extraction, an Air Pulse cartridge filter. Air pulse filters are high-efficiency extraction systems with self-cleaning attributes, maximising the operational life of the filter medium inside. The unit cleans the filter cartridges by “pulsing” compressed air through the clean side of the filter element, effectively removing all contaminants off of the filter medium.
Moreover, this process is carried out automatically by the system. Electrical controls monitor the cartridge’s condition, and once a certain differential pressure has been exceeded, the unit cleans the cartridge. All carried out without interrupting operations and eliminating unnecessary pulse cleaning.
The Result
The team at Airblast is gratified to have been selected among our competitors to design, manufacture, and install a sound-attenuated blast room for Conquip. Investing in this new comprehensive facility, Conquip can look forward to decreased operating costs and more factory throughput, enabling it to meet and exceed demand.
