Compressor moisture example

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I’m not taking sides on this topic, I’m not an engineer, chemist, physicist etc. but I do know where I work we have many types of compressors ( centrifugal, screw, lobe, and multiple piston ) and most if not all are never taken offline, ( 24/7/365 ) unless for a outage or repairs! now some, mostly the centrifugal comp. we don’t care about output moisture but input moisture is the concern because of the erosion and wear on the impellers and diffuser, some of the other compressors it’s output moisture because we use it for instrument air and other critical uses!, either way we use many different types of separating the moisture/condensation from said compressors such as prefilters/after filters, cyclone separator’s, moisture traps, scrubbers, desiccant Dryers, After coolers etc. to the point, the higher the humidity the more moisture we get out of the pre and or after filters/traps/separators/scrubbers/coolers higher dew point of desiccant dryers, and so on, Just my observation, mind you we go from very humid summers to dryer winters. I will say this, I’ve never heard one of our engineers or contractors say your Air compressor is making to much moisture or water!
 
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Hi,

The user manual has several tables to be used to determine the filter life. The variables are humidity, volume, and fill pressure. They then specify a max widget gain to determine when the filter is saturated. Gaining the 8 grams over 10 months and 11 fills seems to be in spec.

I don’t think you have to worry about humidity when you are shooting since the air is decompressing and you are pushing dry air out. That said I shot about 300 rounds fairly rapidly yesterday and did get some condensation on the outside of the LDC. Pretty sure any condensation would be on the outside of the barrel.
 
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Yeah condensation is expected -- decompression results in cooling, compressor results in heating. It's the whole refridgeration loop used in HVAC but applied to air guns. Filling a vessel causes a temperature rise, decompressing a vessel results in temperature reduction. Shooting 300 rounds rapidly will absolutely cause the barrel and LDC to cool. Seen it many times here in the South East when shooting outside in higher humidity.

Sadly it has nothing to do with the quality of the air in the vessel and more so the physics behind entropy exchange, pressures, volumes, Charles' Law, Boyles Law, etc.

All the best and thank you for your post!
 
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Yeah condensation is expected -- decompression results in cooling, compressor results in heating. It's the whole refridgeration loop used in HVAC but applied to air guns. Filling a vessel causes a temperature rise, decompressing a vessel results in temperature reduction. Shooting 300 rounds rapidly will absolutely cause the barrel and LDC to cool. Seen it many times here in the South East when shooting outside in higher humidity.

Sadly it has nothing to do with the quality of the air in the vessel and more so the physics behind entropy exchange, pressures, volumes, Charles' Law, Boyles Law, etc.

All the best and thank you for your post!
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I believe that it is confusion about this process that has led to the misconception by people who should know better, that heat build up in hand-pumps hand compressors, magically make water that wouldn't otherwise occur in a cold machine.😉
 
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Yeah condensation is expected -- decompression results in cooling, compressor results in heating. It's the whole refridgeration loop used in HVAC but applied to air guns. Filling a vessel causes a temperature rise, decompressing a vessel results in temperature reduction. Shooting 300 rounds rapidly will absolutely cause the barrel and LDC to cool. Seen it many times here in the South East when shooting outside in higher humidity.

Sadly it has nothing to do with the quality of the air in the vessel and more so the physics behind entropy exchange, pressures, volumes, Charles' Law, Boyles Law, etc.

All the best and thank you for your post!
Click to expand...

Nothing incorrect in what you stated. However in the HV AC system vast majority of the cooling effect is from the heat of vaporization changing the refrigerant from a liquid form to a vapor form.
 
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