Application Note: Monitoring of air compressors

Customer Requirement

Compressed air is a commonly used power source by manufacturers worldwide. As manufacturing capacity expands the capacity of the compressors need to increase to meet the increased demand.

It is important to select the correct capacity compressor, if a compressor is selected that is too large then it will only operate occasionally and even when idling compressors consume a lot of power.

A company who installs compressors required a small but powerful data acquisition unit that field personnel could easily use to measure the on time to off time and current consumption of a wide range of compressor models.

Equipment

• DT50 data logger
• DeLogger 4 Pro
• Panel Mount Display

dataTaker Solution

Current clamp is placed around the supply to the compressor. The field engineer can then monitor the logger while the compressor is operating in the loaded and idol states. The field engineer is able to adjust sensitivity levels from a panel mounted display and once set can fix the threshold values to avoid others tampering with the test.

The dataTaker data logger is then left on site to record the current levels and on time to off time. At the end of the test period the data is used in an energy survey to determine if the compressor is of correct size.