Cutting energy, reducing costs

Medical gas equipment specialist, BeaconMedæs, has been particularly active in this respect, and here Andy Tudor, the company’s product and marketing manager, explains how some of the key technologies work, and outlines the long-term benefits.

BeaconMedæs and our parent company, Atlas Copco, combined their expertise to launch a new medical air plant system early in 2012. Visitors to the Healthcare Estates 2011 exhibition in November that year in Manchester were able to experience the mAir medical air plant first-hand on the BeaconMedæs stand. They saw the GA-MED Variable Speed Drive oil-flooded screw compressor, and dMED medical air dryer/purifier, all controlled with an ES-MED advanced controller with LAN and GSM connectivity. The dryer introduced an important new concept as well, Purge Saver – active dryer purge control. To understand purge control, it is first of all worth explaining what a medical air dryer is, and how it operates. The medical air dryer/purifier A dryer is a duplexed purification package for converting a compressed air source into breathing quality air. This air can be used at 4 bar working pressure to drive equipment such as ventilators. It can also be provided at higher working pressures such as 11 or 8 bar used to drive surgical tools. To create breathable medical grade air, a dryer will include various different filters to remove different impurities. The dMED has 7 stages of active purification used to remove the following elements (see Fig. 1):

1 Water separator – liquid water.
2 Bulk aerosol filter – oil and water.
3 Fine coalescing filter – oil and water.
4 Desiccant dryer – water and CO2.
5 Activated carbon – gaseous impurities.
6 Catalyst – CO oxidation.
7 Bacteria filter – bacteria/fine particles.