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Ginners attend SC Air School

More than 25 people attended the Air School recently held in Santee, South Carolina. The school was designed primarily to educate SC gins with a new air quality rule they will have to be complying with in the coming years. The attendees heard from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) on the new rule and what to expect when an inspector shows up.

The new rule moves from a standard of compliance based on how many bales per hour the gin did to an equipment based standard where compliance is based on properly sized cyclones. Existing gins with gin stand capacities less than 20 bph will be allowed to have fine mesh screens on their condenser drums. In addition to maintaining a log book of all pollution control

related activities (patching, inspection, etc.) there will also be weekly static air pressure readings. These readings will be made to ensure that the cyclones are running at design efficiency.

In order to better understand how air at the cyclone is related to all other parts of a system, attendees learned how how behaves in a gin, where problems can arrise and the basics of gin air flow design. In addition to learning about cyclones and air flows, issues such matching capacities and taking basic air readings in a system were also covered.

Finally, many of the attendees moved to a gin where participants got a chance to take actual air readings on one of the fans. This is also where additional information on ways of taking the requisite static pressures and the problems that are going to be faced with this.

We would like to thank Kimbell Gin Machinery for allowing John Fabian to come and participate in the school as one of the main instructors.