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Designing a small but highly efficient blast room for a leading manufacturer of gears and gearboxes
Client
Undisclosed
Location
United Kingdom
Brief
Design a compact but highly efficient blast room. Minimising workshop floor footprint must take priority.
Background
In early 2024, a firm specialising in the manufacture of gears and gearboxes reached out to Airblast to construct a highly efficient, compact blast room to process their machined components before coating. They have specialised in designing and manufacturing those components for over a decade, grounded in extensive research and exacting manufacturing processes.
Our client previously had surface preparation equipment on site, but their previous setup was inefficient and was bottle-necking production. They required a compact but uncompromising blast room to increase turnaround items and throughput.
The Solution
At our client’s site, we were informed that the dimensions of this new blast room had to fit within a strict floor plan. This facility also required ample room for operators to work comfortably and efficiently inside while utilising the most comprehensive abrasive recovery solution for their production demands, space-saving features, and soundproofing.
Space-saving roller door
This blast room has been outfitted with roller doors to optimise and reduce floor space encroachment, typically found with hinge doors. Opening vertically, the shutter rolls into an overhead box stored compactly above the portal, allowing fast and easy access inside the blast room. Our roller door is specifically manufactured to cope with the rigours of a blast booth environment. Consisting of two parts, inner dust proof and outer steel rollers, this door has been a standard option on Airblast blast booths for several years and preferred option by our engineers. It is available for booths with doors up to 5mt wide.
Highly efficient double vaculift and blow-down
After discussing our client’s production demands, we opted for the double vaculift abrasive recovery system. The double vaculift is compact but uncompromisingly powerful. Abrasive is manually swept into a collection alcove, and a pneumatic elevator pulls abrasive into a sieve and air wash to filter viable abrasive from spent media. A two-way air valve can be between toggled compressed air recovery and blasting modes, switching in seconds by the operator, ensuring high productivity.
To aid manual sweeping of abrasive into the vaculift, we also incorporated blow-down facilities into our client’s blast machine. This blow-down facility allows pressurised air to flow from the blast nozzle to blow settled abrasive inside the blast room into the vaculift’s alcove.
Acoustically attenuated panels
The blast booth was to be hosted in our client’s machine shop, and keeping ambient noise levels to a minimum was a major consideration. We constructed the blast room from composite, twin-skinned, sound-insulating panels to reduce operational noise egress into the wider environment. In the centre of the panel’s skins is sound-attenuating foam that dampens the sound emitting from inside the blast room.
The Result
Our client now benefits from a fully equipped, highly optimised, and incredibly efficient blast room. Built to exact standards and maintaining a compact footprint, they can streamline their production, increasing overall turnaround times, productivity, and throughput.
