Air filtration for fumes from cutting nylon with an electric hot knife
Hi. My friend is running a home business and it involves cutting nylon with a hot knife.
Currently, he is opening door/window and running a fan. However, this is less than satisfactory.
I brought up making a range hood over a work station, but he mentioned the strong odor that occurs at the exit point out of doors already and would rather filter the fumes out.
He did price some fancy filtration system at $2K with a $1K for every time he changes filters. We were thinking that it was overkill for nylon fumes and thought maybe a hepa filter with charcoal filter would be enough, but we are unsure.
If he needs to go spendy, he will as health matters, but if there is a less spendy way to accomplish this, he wants to go that way.
This is about two hours a week of his manufacturing process.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. -Mike
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Replies
The usual solution to “its smelly at the exhaust” is to use a higher stack: get the vent up away from people so that the fumes are more dispersed before they get back down to ground level. That’s probably the easiest, and the cheapest, option.
If you want to filter out the fumes, the carbon filter alone is probably sufficient. Activated carbon is pretty good at filtering out organic compounds like polymer fumes. You might also look at the fume extractors used in the semiconductor industry to filter out solder smoke. Techni-tool is one specialty tool supplier that I know stocks some of hose fume extractors.
Bill
Are these fumes toxic? Are they flammable? You are right to have him make some type of hood setup under which he should do his cutting. Incorporating a proper blower to assist ventilation would seem the way to go. A simple set up of a hood, a 90, a short horizontal run to a tee, then a stack, with the blower pointing up from the bottom of the tee.
Depending on the area in question, you think a used range or stove hood would suffice?
This seemed like a pretty helpful resource on this topic:
https://www.sentryair.com/blog/manufacturing/smoke-generated-from-hot-knife-hot-wire-cutting-processes/
Peter