The design of any air dryer is critical to its life span. Many dryers especially the smaller dryers for air compressors with capacities from 0.38 to 1.5 m³/min are built to price.
There are several components that make up a “normal” dryer. They are a Freon compressor, a heat exchanger to cool the compressed air to 3 °C, and the finned condenser coil with its electric fan.
It’s the condenser coil and the fan that invariably causes dryers’ premature failure. The fan, on small capacity dryers, has a bush, not a bearing. Atmospheric dust and dirt cause the bush to fail, the fan motor to burn out, the fan to stop, and the Freon system to get excessively hot. The high gas temperature now burns out the Freon compressor winding as well. The result is a dryer that will need a new Freon compressor, and a new fan motor, add to this the cost of the gas and the technician’s time and travel expenses and you may as well go out and purchase a new dryer!
If the fan bush does not fail, the close fin design of the condenser is the next cause of failure. As dirt blocks the cooling airflow through the condenser the gas temperature rises, the fan switch overworks, and the bush works harder along with the fan motor. Either an elevated gas temperature “kills” the Freon compressor or again the bush fails! Result, a busted dryer that will cost more than it’s worth to repair.
It’s the most reliable dryer ever built in the last 4 decades
The TX Series of air dryers is a “bomb” proof air dryer that will work in any site conditions that it is exposed to… Why, because the design is radically different. It has a static condenser. It’s the same as your wides spaced fridge freezer condenser panel at home, an evaporative cooler with no fan. That means no bush. That means no close fin spacing, so dirt cannot accumulate on the condenser coil. There are only three moving parts on the dryer, a timed electric condensate drain, the Freon compressor, and a rotary dew point indicator.
The Freon circuit is very different from a “normal” dryer. The gas leaving the compressor is passed into the static coil for cooling using cooler atmospheric air, then to the Air to Freon re-heater exchanger, this cools the hot Freon and simultaneously re-heats the compressed air ready to enter the airline. The gas then passes to the main Air to Freon exchanger to cool the compressed air to dew point. From there it returns to the compressor. It’s the most reliable dryer ever built in the last 4 decades.
I know, I have been selling compressed air dryers longer than anyone else in the air industry, I sold my first compressed air dryer in early 1971 in the UK. Artic Driers has sold thousands of these dryers with an almost zero return rate. The price is attractive and comparable to many low-cost Eastern-built dryers from Asia. It is the ultimate in compressed air dryer reliability in the international market.
