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Have you ever seen the compressed air coming out of your pressure reserve wasn’t strong enough to trip an actuator? This can be frustrating, especially if you’re working with a piece of equipment that’s already being pushed to its limits.

Some pneumatic technicians live in fear of the day that they have to walk into a new workshop, largely because they never know how well kept the older machinery there was. Imagine you just took up your first day on the job and found that everything was coated in muck.

Considering the fact that so many people use air compresses that are powered by electricity, you might be under the impression that electro-pneumatic technology doesn’t go any further than this. That being said, when technologists use the name electro-pneumatic control system, they normally mean a class of components that incorporate both electrical and compressed air-driven technology on a particularly close level.

Solenoid valves are a combination of two different technologies that operate in tandem in order to ensure the best processing of any workpieces your organization has to deal with. Whenever they’re applied correctly, these units leverage the power of both electrical and pneumatic technology to get the job done.

Static electricity is a huge potential problem that could impact otherwise safe pneumatic systems. Compressed air is often deployed as a power source in situations where you wouldn’t be able to work with any other source of energy.

Take a moment to look at your current compressed air-driven machinery and see if you can tell whether or not you’re using the right pneumatic control valves on it. Are you? Even the slightest mismatch can cause big problems and even a loss of pressure, which can drastically reduce the efficiency of the system that you’re working with, which is why you need pneumatic control valves.

Do you know if your compressed air systems are wasting more power than they need to? You’ve probably heard that pneumatic solutions are among the most effective and efficient on the market. While this is true in many use cases, whether or not it is for you depends entirely on how your equipment is getting deployed. If you’re not doing in the right way, then you can’t trust that the gear you’re working with won’t be operating in a relatively wasteful manner.

Are you using the right kind of pneumatic valve on each compressed air-driven system you have installed in your workshop? You might be surprised to learn that there are countless options regarding each type of pneumatic valve you’re likely to find.

Are you operating your pneumatic equipment the best way you know how? Many small business owners are looking for ways to cut costs and improve safety. Representatives of larger organizations have often expressed concerns that people are deferring maintenance and not operating things as well as they could be.

Technicians will sometimes work to develop an advanced level of skills in almost every aspect of pneumatic technology yet save the basics for last. You certainly could do things this way, but it makes the learning process that much more difficult. Learning about the basics of pneumatic air preparation before you work with a pneumatic circuit will make things much easier to configure in the long run.

If you’ve been involved with compressed air-driven machinery for any length of time, then you’ve surely heard about some engineers who’ve debated back and forth whether air lubricators are still as important as they used to be. Those who are in favor argue that lubrication helps to reduce friction between sliding surfaces as well as improve efficiency and the speed at which individual pneumatic components cycle.

Think about what might happen if an important mission-critical pneumatic system of yours suddenly went down for the count. Would you be able to do any work at all? How would your business adapt?

Have you ever been looking through a catalog or schematic and found that you don’t recognize a pneumatic part? The same problem happens to those who are trying to connect electrical equipment and even hydraulic gear. In any of these situations, it can stop you right in your tracks and even be a little embarrassing,

Are you ever stumped by the measurements written out on diagrams that spell out how different pneumatic installations are supposed to be connected? Don’t feel embarrassed if that’s the case. It happens to the best of us.

How different do you think electrical switches are from pneumatic ones? In theory, they’re not all that different at least as far as their underlying working principle goes. The concept of either device is to deflect the flow of something from one potential path to another. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long at all to master the basics of how a pneumatic switch operates.

Have you ever looked at a pneumatic blueprint and felt that your eyes are just glazing over? Pretty much everyone has had that kind of issue, especially if they’re working with plans developed by someone other than their own crew.

Do you think of pneumatic equipment as only ever providing flow in one direction? In a majority of cases, you’ll usually see compressed air-driven equipment that’s designed to accept positive pressure and experience airflow moving forward but never backward. On the other hand, though, there’s a whole world of tools out there that are designed to work the other way.

You’re probably used to thinking of compressed air as being a forward force. It’s possible to also distribute it in the other direction meaning that you can actually make a vacuum using nothing but compressed air.

We have a quick question for you; do you really know how much air your current pneumatic installation consumes? Chances are that you don’t and you’ve been winging it. As a result, you may end up spending far more on the power you’re using than you’d ever have to. You shouldn’t need to use all that much, considering that compressed air-driven equipment is some of the most efficient and safe stuff you can normally get your hands on.

Would you like to deploy a system that doesn’t really do anything at all besides sit there? Unfortunately, that’s what a compressed air-driven circuit would be like without individual system components!

How would you feel if you had to breathe dirty or oily air? You probably wouldn’t like it much, so you might imagine that there’s a good chance that your pneumatic equipment doesn’t like to be exposed to this either. Anyone who operates any kind of pneumatic system should be sure to invest the time and effort into ensuring that the air coursing through it is clean, dry and free of unnecessary oil.

How much good would your pneumatic system be without any fittings? Considering that these are what allow you to connect pipes and hoses together, your system probably wouldn’t be worth very much without them. Nevertheless, they’re a portion of many people’s systems that don’t get nearly enough attention. You’ll want to find a connection that works best for your system and is made from a material that you prefer.

How would you like a type of actuator on the market that was easy to install and maintain? What if this hypothetical actuator was also very quiet? As you may have guessed, it’s an electric linear actuator.

There’s an old saying that significantly advanced technology will end up seeming like magic if you don’t know how it works. While pneumatic air cylinders might seem magical, they’re actually based on a very simple engineering principle. This simplicity is what makes them so remarkably reliable.

Here’s a quick question; when is the last time that you actually took a moment to consider whether your gear was operating at peak efficiency? There’s a good chance that you haven’t done so in a very long time, simply because you figured that it