Applications

Our volume flow measuring devices are successfully used for precise consumption measurements in the industrial application of technical gases, liquids and compressed air. Already today there are well-known enterprises in the EU and Japan among our customers.

Our customers do know very well about the importance of a reliable consumption control for expensive technical gases and compressed air with its high operating costs. Under no circumstances they can accept the monthly energy- or gas-cost account (!) as the one and only possibility to get real informations about the consumption development in the plant. Weaknesses in the pipe system would otherwise remain undiscovered and increase the running costs. Uneconomic cost centers would continue to work as always before and produce the same avoidable costs month after month.

Compressed air, e.g., is an invaluable carrier for mechanical energy: in Germany there are 60,000 installed facilities. Their annual current consumption sums up to 14,000,000,000 kWh: this is about as much as the current consumption of the whole German railway infrastructure and must be generated by four coal power stations or 1.3 nuclear power plants.

By the time the compressed air delivers the desired mechanical energy, it has gone a very long way: from the primary energy sources (eg coal) there was current produced (with high power losses), this current was passed to compressors, and only with further losses it is possible to get a fraction of the electrical energy (once put in) back again from the compressed air.

And though compressed air is one of the most expensive forms of energy, industry and handicrafts use up to 40 % more than necessary. Many facilities do not match the actual needs, have high leakages or simply are out of date. 200 mio. € and emissions of 1.7 mio. tons of CO2 could be saved per year.

Compressed air comes in consumption therefore always more expensive than the direct use of electricity. Why is compressed air then still used so widely? Well, quite simple: pneumatic devices used in the production (screwdrivers, drills, etc.) are more efficient and at the same time cheaper and more robust than comparable electrical tools. In addition, their lighter weight reduces the physical burden of the production employees. For employees, a defective pneumatic tool can never put them at risk to suffer an electrical shock. These are just a few important reasons why the industry uses compressed air.

To draw an analogy, the VSM-02 can be compared with an electrical consumption counter (you know, the lead-sealed kWh-counter which can be found in every household). In both cases it is all about the recording and documentation of consumption rates. As a matter of course, the measurement itself must not have any noticeable effects on the measured value, nor is it allowed to temporarily cut off consumers from the power supply. With electricity, precise consumption records are no problem at all (see kWh-counters). It is even common practice to equip bigger electrical consumers with a counter of their own. In gas and compressed air applications, however, the situation had always been a completely :-( different one.

The main reason for the traditionally bad consumption transparency in the industrial use of gases and compressed air was the non-existence of handy and payable, but nevertheless precise & reliable measuring devices. In opposition to consumption counters for electricity, which can be build in a simple way without own intelligence, a consumption counter for gases and compressed air must know about / measure a multitude of parameters, physical units and calibration data. In the VSM-02 this is accomplished with several microprocessors in conjunction with EEPROM-based, individual calibration tables. The correct measuring procedures for gases and compressed air are well-known in principle. Exact DIN- and EN-standards have been existent for decades. Standardized test benches, however, were very expensive up to now, they were stationary, complicated and required an engineer to perform the measurements.

With the VSM-02 we succeeded to shrink a large, standardized test bench to such a size that now, for the first time, mobile precision measurements have become possible. And because of its 'built-in engineer', so to say, the device can also be operated by less qualified personnel. Being maintenance-free, it can as well be permanently installed, quite similar to the installation of an electrical current counter. Permanently installed units can easily be connected to form a network, which can provide a central overview for accounting purposes. More than that, the cost centers which cause an extraordinary consumption can be spotted immediately, virtually in the very moment in which the consumption is caused (!). This is what we call 'real consumption transparency'. Another remarkable feature of the VSM-02 are its optional analogue outputs, resp. the programmable switching outputs, which offer a vast number of additional possible applications, especially in the field of process control. In this way the measuring device can be used to monitor programmable flow thresholds, release an alarm if necessary, automatically switch on/off air compressors and much more.

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