Dust Control

Proptec™ and Penguin™ Rotary Atomizers are particularly useful for dust control applications. Spraying water to control dust combines three separate activities:

• Increases the humidity, which reduces the amount of static electricity in the air and therefore the tendency of dust to be created
• impacts the floating dust particles with water droplets, coalescing them into heavier particles and cleaning the air as they fall out
• And lastly, actually wets the ground surface or working area so that dust is not liberated in the first place

   

  

If your jobsite was the size of a sandbox, dust control would be easy! But if you live in the real world and your working area is measured in acres rather than feet, you need big spray capacity to control dust.

 

Consider the following example:

 

Let’s say that you wanted to control dust over 1 acre of land, from the ground to about 10 feet up. You would need to humidify and spray over 430,000 cubic feet of air. That’s no little sandbox! Say you wanted to raise the relative humidity to 70%. The starting temperature was 80 degrees F and 10% relative humidity. to figure this out takes alot of math and a thing called a psychrometric chart- which we decided to spare you from. We bottom-lined it below.

 

To bring that air on that acre to 70% relative humidity would require about 47 gallons of water to be sprayed and evaporated. No big deal, you say? Seems like you should be able to do that with a garden hose in about 10 minutes. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy…

 

If there was a wind of only 5 miles per hour (7.3 feet per second, or 440 feet per minute), that means ALL that air you just humidified is being replaced about every 30 seconds with new, DRY air.

 

Now to keep your worksite wetted, you would need to spray and evaporate twice that amount of water, every minute! 94 gallons of water a minute sprayed and evaporated- wow, that starts to get to be a big job…. But not too big for Proptec Atomizers!

 

 

It is likely that your job is smaller, and that you could treat the dust right at the point source to reduce the amount of apparatus you will need. Whatever your scale, we have the atomizers to do the job.

 

 

 

The Benefits of Rotary atomizers in Dust Control:

1. Air cleaning: As the rotary atomizer sprays, the fine spray will be scrubbing dust out of the air- and those little mud balls will be falling to the ground, rather than drifting off-site.
2. The increase in Relative humidity will reduce the amount of dust that is liberated into the air in the first place.
3. Some of the water will fall to the ground, preventing further dust from being liberated.

4. As an additional benefit, you get about 8000 BTU’s of cooling (depending on the amount of dissolved solids in the water) per gallon of evaporated water. This means that your acre would see cooling to the effect of nearly 800,000 BTU’s per minute, or 48 million BTU’s per hour, at no additional cost! Your site will be more cool and comfortable for your operators and your equipment.

 

Controlling dust with rotary atomizers makes sense!

 

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