Numatics Resource
Are you looking to reduce the amount of compressed air that you use in your pneumatic circuit? Or maximize productivity? Or minimize the cost of the pneumatic valves and pneumatic actuators? Numatics Inc. developed a technique in the 1970’s called Numasizing in order to effectively and efficiently use compressed air in your pneumatic circuit. These calculations are always very accurate because they are based on ~250,000 test firings of actual pneumatic cylinders, not theoretical or mathematical models.
With this tool at our disposal, our pneumatics experts can help your team meet or exceed your needs or the needs of your customers by optimizing your pneumatic circuit.
Numasizing Pneumatic Design Objective
Numasizing is a tool that was built to help meet your design objective. To start, we need to know whether you are looking to:
- Minimize Energy Cost – Compressed Air Usage
- Minimize Cost of Pneumatic Valves and Pneumatic Actuators
- Maximize Productivity – Speed of Pneumatic Actuators
Any or all of these objectives may be of importance to your organization. By identifying the key factor, we can optimize a pneumatic design to meet those needs. Take a look at how it can help with each.
Energy Efficiency
Energy efficiency is large concern for many of our customers for a variety of reasons. Typically, compressed air can account for between 10% and 35% of your electricity consumption. We can minimize the amount of compressed air used to cycle the pneumatic actuators by optimizing the air pressures and pneumatic component sizes. This will increase the overall energy efficiency of the pneumatic design.
Minimize Component Cost
An OEM may want to provide the most cost-effective pneumatic circuit. In order to minimize the cost of your pneumatic design, the smallest pneumatic valves and pneumatic actuators would be used to meet you design requirements.
Maximize Productivity
An end user may be more focused on the overall productivity of the machine. In this case, components are selected to minimize the cycle time of the pneumatic actuators rather than energy efficiency or component size.
Numasizing Input Information
Once an objective is determined, using the Numasizing tool will be rather easy. However, gather the following information will help ensure we get the correct outcome:
- Labor cost – $ per hour / # of hrs per shift / shifts per day / days per week
- Air Cost – Cost per KwHr
- Cycle Times – Extend / Retract / Dwells
- Pressures – Minimum Line Pressure / max Design Pressure (typically 80% of min. line pressure)
- Weights – Extend Load / Retract Load
- Friction – Materials between load and fixture
- Actuator Information – # of actuators / stroke(s) / bore(s) / 90 degree fittings?
- Conductors – Sizes and lengths of supply lines
With this information, we can run the calculations to meet your specific design goals. Whichever design objective you determine, our team is here to help you find the best solutions to help your operation increase efficiency. Contact our team to optimize your pneumatic circuit today!
