Dealing with Angel Hairs Angel hairs in pneumatic conveyance is a longstanding problem. It certainly is not welcome in transparent tubing. Angle hairs are described by Theile as "those fuzzy, fitful, filmy pieces of plastic that drive us crazy, and. there is nothing...
Problems and Solutions
Whenever I hear of a "circle within a circle" I think of the bizarre description of deity in Ezekiel Chapter 1 (well, in his case it's a wheel within a wheel). In our case, it's a prototype. And it was a challenge. We were to produce an air-tight, water-tight...
Cleaning Butyrate tubing: Cellulose Acetate Butyrate, as any transparent tubing can accumulate grime, oils, and get scratched by abrasives. Also, it will weather and age due to UV light and oxidizers. When the latter occurs, the tubing cannot be cleaned by traditional...
We were asked to provide a Coefficient of Static Friction for our butyrate tubing. The problem is that the surface roughness is only one part of the equation, the base material is another. We defined our materials as aluminum and steel with CAB.The simple test for...
We often fit bends to pneumatic (or other) systems from a distance. We ask the customers to send us as much information as they can provide. From that, we do our best to calculate OD, radius, and angle of the bend. Here is another example from last week. As you can...
Tight –radius bends are a problem to all tube benders. On a tight radius, we can run into excessive flattening, cracking of the outside wall, or buckling in the inside wall (most commonly). The problem is intensified in transparent, thermoplastics benders, for we do...
We recently had quite a challenge from Metraflex regarding a transparent tight-radius 4” pipe 90° bend. They required a transparent 4” Sch 40 long-radius elbow to observe a metal fin in a fluid system. The pipe bend needed to maintain a tight tolerance for ovality as...
Sometimes we just have to be creative when we get calls from damsels in distress. We received a call from such a damsel who needed to replace a worn-out PVC tube and a more worn-out HDPE carrier. Busada pneumatic tubing consists of three major parts; the tube, the...
Ovality, or out-of-roundedness can be a problem in pneumatic conveying. Our tolerance of out of roundness varies with our tube outer diameter. Ovality can be checked with calipers (as usually the case checking the OD) but in certain circumstances, we need a machined...
Busada makes long-radius sweeps (bends) in CAB (butyrate), Provista, Polycarbonate, and PVC, but recently completed its first PETG bend. The bend was on a 24" Radius with extended tangents. All bends are made to order, with a 10 point check to see that degree, radius,...
Problem: Extrude a heavy-walled small diameter pneumatic tube; in this case the wall area composes 75% of the tubing area. The difficulty comes in maintaining wall uniformity while eliminating “lensing,” uneven cooling, uneven shrinkage (curling) and chatter lines....