Compressed air is commonly used in factories for a great variety of purposes e.g.: driving hand held pneumatic riveters, screwdrivers, wrenches, drills, grinders, polishers etc; spray painting;...

Compressed air is commonly used in factories for a great variety of purposes e.g.: driving hand held pneumatic riveters, screwdrivers, wrenches, drills, grinders, polishers etc; spray painting; operating forging hammers; air jet cleaning; agitation of liquids; operation of hoists; driving linear actuators in automatic machinery; operating clutches and brakes; operating control valves. Air motor driven hand held tools, although in some cases not very energy efficient, have some advantages over their electric equivalents. These small air motor advantages include: being lighter and smaller for a given power output; being free of shock risk; and being able to stall without overheating. In this project you will consider a factory’s compressed air requirements and produce a system design to supply the compressed air. The overall project will be divided up into modular assignments, which will be progressively dealt with. For some of the plant items you will need to determine required capacity and such like and then make a catalogue selection, but for at least one item of plant, namely the air receiver, you will be designing the component itself. Students are to work in pairs, submitting joint reports with clearly identified individual contributions. The required subdivision of contributions will be given in the assignment questions (these subdivisions are intended to give a reasonable distribution of work load and learning experiences). Some of the questions call for discussion of: the issues involved; the decisions made; and the consequences of various courses of action. These considerations are an important part of the design process and an important part of the assessment, do not neglect them.