IN what’s being billed as a first for South Africa’s compressor rental market, Rand-Air recently took delivery of an Atlas Copco DXT85VSD electrically-driven, oil-free air/nitrogen booster complete with high-pressure hoses.
Coupled with their oil-free compressor and dryer, the compressor and generator rental company says this means it can now offer a total solution for 42 bar high-pressure, oil-free compressed air. The 100kW DXT has a high outlet pressure range of 25 to 42 bars at volumes of 700 cubic feet a minute (cfm): which makes it suitable for a range of specialised industrial applications, including food and beverage packaging.
“Previously, we offered diesel-driven oil injected ‘boosters’ or compressors; which we provided to our customers in response to demand from the drilling and geological exploration market sector,” said Rand-Air Fleet Manager Craig Swart.
However, said Swart, enquiries for high-pressure oil-free compressed air from the local soft drink manufacturing and bottling industry highlighted the suitability of the Atlas Copco DXT compressor.
Diesel-driven oil-injected boosters were not suitable for this application as there was a certain amount of oil residue in the compressed air they supplied. Also, diesel-driven oil-injected boosters were not designed to provide a 24/7 compressed air supply to manufacturing facilities.
“While in Europe, the DXT is mainly used in steam production applications, we anticipate that in South Africa – as industry sees the potential of this compressor – there could be demand for more units of this type from a number of other industry sectors,” he said.
For ease of handling and deployment, the DXT has the same dimensions and attaching points as a standard shipping container.
Rand-Air Marketing and Communications Manager Byrone Thorne said, “This unit is obviously more suited to long-term rental applications. Should we receive more enquiries for machines of this nature, we can speedily supply additional units from Europe”.
“We are pleased to have added the DXT to our compressor fleet, as it is operationally an expansion of our high-pressure oil-free solution offering,” Thorne added. The new DXT compressor beefs up the company’s current fleet of some 400 rental compressors, which make up part of a total fleet of 1,100 compressors, generators and related equipment.
Swart said that with units of this nature, on a long-term rental, customers have the advantage of knowing exactly what their future compressed air costs will be over the next five years, for example. “This makes it much easier for our customers to project future input costs, total cost-of-ownership (TCO) and overall return-on-investment (ROI).”