Necessity is the mother of invention. The Spark Cooler is a perfect example. The product was developed in house at Blender Products, Inc. www.airblender.com , to address a problem of metal dust spark fires in our own dust collection system. After installing a high-definition plasma table and Donaldson Torit collector on our shop floor a few years back, our production team ran into regular interruptions due to fires in the collector that were not only filling the facility with smoke, but also damaging expensive filters. Our local rep, AirPro, was great in helping us design and implement alternatives, but the team was never satisfied with the outcome (i.e., subpar spark reduction, large pressure drop, additional maintenance, etc.). Ultimately, we built upon our core technology and developed the Spark Cooler, and have not had a fire since.
Over the years, some have asked us, isn’t this just your static air mixer packaged differently? The answer is that the design of the Spark Cooler is different, and involves a modification of the blade configuration and proprietary sizing that is specific to each size of Spark Cooler. While our 40 years of experience in engineering, designing and manufacturing equipment to condition air for temperature, velocity, humidity and other profiling, for a wide range of industrial processes, gave us the working knowledge that allowed us to eliminate some designs that make sense on paper, the Spark Cooler is a unique design. An example of this is that we quickly dismissed the “jet turbine” blade configuration we had used in other applications, knowing that the associated pressure loss outweighed the performance it delivered.
We believe the Spark Cooler achieves the sweet spot of performance to functionally address the persistent problem of sparks in metal dust process application. It is not a spark trap that promises 100% eradication of sparks, but, applied correctly it can dramatically reduce spark counts and the resulting fire events, and it does so with minimal negative performance and operating trade offs.
