Refrigerated Compressed Air Dryers, 5 to 12,500 SCFM

What a Refrigerated Air Dryer Does

Compressing air to 100 psig packs almost eight cubic feet of room air, and all the water vapor in it, into one. The aftercooler wrings most of that water out, but the air leaves it saturated, and it sheds more every time it cools further down the line, through an outside wall or inside a tool as the air expands. A refrigerated dryer takes the air to 38°F in a refrigerant-cooled exchanger, separates the condensate that forms, drains it, and reheats the outgoing air against the incoming stream so the pipe does not sweat. The result is a 38°F pressure dew point, ISO 8573-1 class 4, which is dry enough for any tool, cylinder, valve, spray gun or packaging machine that lives indoors. Every dryer is rated at 100 psig, 100°F inlet air and 100°F ambient; hotter air or a hotter room means a larger model, and that is where most sizing goes wrong.

Four Ways to Find the Right Dryer

The site is arranged the way the enquiries arrive. If you know the flow, start at Refrigerated Dryers, where non-cycling, cycling and special-duty models are grouped by flow band from 5 to 50 SCFM up to 2,500 to 12,500 SCFM, with every part number and its rating. If you know the compressor, Dryers by Compressor turns a rotary screw or piston nameplate into a dryer size, at roughly 4.5 SCFM per horsepower for a screw and 3.5 to 4 for a piston machine. If the question is what the air has to do, the Applications pages cover machine shops, paint booths, bottling, PET blow molding and twenty other duties with the dew point and filtration each one needs. And Sizing & Selection holds the arithmetic: the correction factors for inlet temperature, ambient and pressure, cycling against non-cycling, refrigerated against desiccant, and how to replace a dryer that is already installed.

Sized by People, Quoted the Same Day

HeatX is the distributor for every series on this site, and the sizing is done by application people rather than a web calculator. Tell us the compressor horsepower and type, the delivered SCFM, the line pressure, the inlet temperature and the hottest the room gets, and we apply the corrections, pick the first model at or above the corrected duty, and match the 1 micron prefilter, the 0.01 micron oil-removal afterfilter and a zero-loss drain to it. When a piston compressor has no aftercooler we say so and quote the high-inlet-temperature model instead of a standard dryer that would lose half its capacity on 180°F air. We are on 1-805-484-2992 and at Sales@HeatX.com from 8am to 5pm, and the quote form reaches the same desk. Pricing goes out the same business day.