Vortec Cooling Vests (VCVs) are a type of specialty protective equipment that is designed to maintain healthy body temperatures in extreme environments- making employees more comfortable and productive. Cooling vests can counter-act the negative effects of both dangerously high and low temperatures that can cause harm to workers, including fatigue and stress.

Combustible vapors, liquids, gases or flammable dusts are often present in many industrial applications. These materials are safe in small amounts, but when they exist in abundance they become a hazard, with the possibility to wreak havoc on production processes and endanger the lives of employees. With the implementation of the correct equipment, these costly hazards can be contained and controlled, making an explosion or large fire avoidable.

A customer contacted ITW Air Management: Vortec about an application for an ATEX Vortex AC enclosure cooler.  The customer’s enclosure was in an ATEX Zone 2 location but the customer stated that the components within the enclosure were already rated and approved for the hazardous location, so they said there was no requirement for a purge system.

In a small corner of dry, arid Colorado, inside a small electric enclosure, a compact but highly advanced piece of technology is helping to keep the power on for thousands of houses across a four-state region. This generation and transmission facility supplies power to dozens of power companies throughout Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming, producing over 11 million megawatt-hours of power through coal, natural gas, and renewable sources.  

For Max Imaging & Electrical, an electrical service company outside of Atlanta, Georgia, their bread and butter is well, bread and butter. Among other clients, Max Imaging services the automation controls on food facilities that bake bread and deep fry products. Baking is a messy business, and mass producing breads, pies and fried goods is a messy industry: flour, breading and batter cloud the air and air conditioners take the brunt of the beating. When the air conditioners on control panels and electrical enclosures goes down, temperature goes up, causing production to shut down for repairs. That’s just the way the cookie crumbled, until Chuck Cohran, President of  Max Imaging & Electrical found Vortex Enclosure Coolers from Vortec.

A large domestic component repair facility that specializes in re-building and testing hydraulic, electro-mechanical and fuel system components for the aerospace and aviation industries needed a solution to cool a fuel control valve for one of their customers. The control valve must accurately regulate fuel flow in response to the temperature. One of the tests required the valve to be cooled to -25°F plus or minus 2°, and the fuel flow measured.

Air Filters are an important part of maintaining an efficient and effective compressed air system. I have often told customers, “The compressed air product is only as good as the compressed air going into it” in other words: “garbage in-garbage out”. Contaminants in the air can quickly clog up and ruin not only the compressed air device, but also your product that depends on it. Oils, vapors, dust, pollen and other particulates are often found in manufacturing facilities. These contaminants, along with moisture, pipe scale, and rust, can easily be produced or find their way into your compressed air distribution system. Therefore, it’s vital to ensure that you eliminate contaminants where the compressed air is being applied, to prevent problems. Most compressed air systems employ filtration at the outlet of the air compressor. This is essential, however filtration at the point of use is also critical. This ensures that additional moisture, rust, etc. is not present in the compressed air piping system before reaching the intended source/product.

Based on many of your requests and questions, I wanted to use this week’s blog post to show you firsthand how to take apart our Cold Air Gun. If you ever feel like your Cold Air Gun is under performing it's always a great idea to inspect the generator to see if it needs to be cleaned or replaced. Since there are no moving parts in our Cold Air Gun’s, more often than not, the generator is the reason behind any performance issues.

Cold Air Guns and vortex tubes are popular spot cooling products that are used in a wide variety of applications, ranging from cooling cutting tools such as band saw and circular saw blades, router bits, lathe tools, HSS drills and milling cutters used for machining of metals, plastics, paper and wood. They are also commonly used to cool parts, dehumidify gas samples, cool sensors, test thermostats and many other applications where an instant and reliable supply of clean cold air is required. Vortex tubes and Cold Air Guns have no moving parts and use only a clean dry source of compressed air for creating cooling capacities up to 6000 btuh (1758 watts).