The Systems Group is proud to announce the SMAC Unit being featured in the August 2020 issue of AIST’s Iron & Steel Technology. Highlighted in the magazine’s ‘Safety First’ section, ‘Keeping Critical Spaces Clean Using Room Pressurization With Self Maintaining Air Cleaners’ was written by Josh Longmire and first presented in Pittsburg at AISTech 2019.
Below is a brief introduction to the paper along with a link to download the full article:
INTRODUCTION
Room pressurization is used in many industries to prevent dust or other materials from entering critical spaces. Hospitals, laboratories, and pharmaceutical manufacturers often use this method to maintain their clean rooms. In steel mills, employee health and safety along with protecting equipment are constant concerns when dealing with dust in this type of an environment. In this paper, we are going to point out the health issues and equipment issues that are normally created by dust in a steel mill environment and how you can use positive pressurization with a specific type of filtration to fix this problem.
There are many lung related health hazards that are caused by breathing metal dust and there are several costly equipment failures caused by metal dust. While most steel mills use HVAC systems to attempt to keep these areas clean, this is inefficient and ineffective because these types of filters are not able to catch all of the dust particles and when the filters have a lot of dust on them, it increases the static pressure resistance on the HVAC system and can reduce the amount of room pressurization. By using positive pressure from a self-maintaining air cleaner, these spaces can be kept clean at a much lower cost and with better results. Positive pressure inside a room is effective in preventing dust from entering the room, and the use of a self-maintaining air cleaner provides effective filtration while creating the positive pressure environment.
