subject: Fume Extraction for Safer Workplaces [print this page] Fume Extraction for Safer Workplaces Fume Extraction for Safer Workplaces
All industrial processes give off some kind of waste. Sometimes, that waste is liquid effluvia, as in the chemical products siphoned off during oil refining; other times, it is dust or solid waste. A lot of industrial waste, though, is fumes gaseous off spill, which can't be captured and disposed off in the normal way. That's where fume extraction comes in.
Gas, or fumes, is defined as anything non-solid or liquid substance given off as the result of a chemical or heat reaction. It may surprise some to discover that all reactions are basically either chemical or heat, but they are "chemicals", after all, really just substances that occur in most industrial processes, and heat is everywhere. Any reaction has a waste product, which in some cases is extremely dangerous and in almost all industrial cases, is certainly bad enough for the environment that it needs to be controlled. Fume extraction is the best and only way of controlling gas effluvia in industrial circumstances.
The "environment" is often thought of as a place where trees grow; a place, in other words, that isn't "here". The environment is the thing we hurt when we belch fumes into the sky, or pour oil into rivers. Right? Wrong. Well, right in part but wrong in total. The environment is everything everywhere anyone or anything is, on or in this planet of ours. And that includes factories themselves. Factories are environments in their own right environments that often have high concentrations of gaseous waste in their atmospheres. The inhabitants of factory environments namely, factory workers need fume extraction to clean the air that they breathe.
So how does it work? Pretty simply, actually until the extracted fumes have to be dealt with and disposed. We'll come to that shortly. First the suck. The fume extraction unit sucks gas out of the air, forcing it into a series of tubes that relay it away from workers and their machinery. These units can either be general sort of like air con in reverse, servicing whole rooms and buildings to maintain clean air on a basic level or highly directed. Directed fume extractors are often placed immediately over the machine whose gas waste they are trying to catch. In extreme cases, they'll be enclosed in an isolation booth with the machine, which allows all fumes to be siphoned off without getting them into the general atmosphere of the factory.
What, then, of the extracted fumes? Once the fume extraction unit has gotten them out of the air, there remains a problem. Unlike solid waste, which is easy to dispose of, gas is gas. How does one dispose off that (for dispose of it one must)? Fortunately, modern fume removal units are equipped with series of clever filters soft filters, wet filters and so on which actually turn the fumes into solid waste (by catalysing them): or funnel them into special "boxes". The boxes can be removed and disposed off in the normal way.
Without fume extraction units, modern industry can't work. With them, it can work and safeguard its own environment as well as the rest of the world.
