Aeration Blowers

What Is Most-Open-Valve Aeration Blower Control?

By Bob Kisler, Regional Sales Manager, Hoffman & Lamson, and Doreen Tresca, Marketing Manager, SSI Aeration

Most-Open-Valve (MOV) control is a common automatic dissolved oxygen (DO) control system. By reducing the required aeration blower discharge pressure, MOV can improve basin efficiency and reduce power requirements if the MOV and aeration blower controls are properly coordinated.

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Understanding Positive Displacement and Centrifugal Blowers

By Tom Jenkins

Learn the key differences between positive displacement (PD) and centrifugal blowers and how advances in blower technology, variable-speed controls and lifecycle cost analysis are reshaping equipment selection. This article explains blower operating principles, performance characteristics and application considerations to help engineers optimize energy efficiency, reliability and long-term operating costs in wastewater, industrial and process air systems.

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Aeration Blowers in the Food Industry

By Bob Kisler, Regional Sales Manager, Hoffman & Lamson, and Doreen Tresca, Marketing Manager, SSI Aeration

From managing complex wastewater streams to protecting stored grain and sustaining fish health, effective airflow is essential to maintaining product quality and operational stability. How advances in blower technology, diffuser materials and automated controls are helping facilities improve efficiency, reduce energy use and meet increasingly strict environmental requirements.

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Best Practices 2025 EXPO & Conference Blower & Vacuum Show Report

By Troy Dreier, Senior Editor, and Brooke Jones, Digital Content Editor, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

The Best Practices 2025 EXPO & Conference contained plenty of sessions for industrial vacuum, blower and aeration blower professionals, including conference tracks, workshops devoted to pneumatic conveying and blower engineering and original equipment manufacturers on the EXPO floor.

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Aeration Blowers, Motors & Drives at Weftec 2025

By Roderick M. Smith, Editor, Blower & Vacuum Best Practices Magazine

Weftec 2025, a leading event for industrial and municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) technologies, took place September 29 to October 1, 2025 at Chicago's McCormick Place. The objective of this article is to provide readers with a sampling of aeration blower, motor and drive technologies on display.

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APG-Neuros Aeration Blowers Treat Industrial Wastewater

By Troy Dreier, Senior Editor, Blower & Vacuum Best Practices

Different industries have differing levels of toxins and contaminants that need to be reduced before wastewater can be discharged. The company specializes in understanding those requirements and creating custom turbo blowers to customer specifications. Its leading industries are pulp and paper, poultry and food and beverage.

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Optimizing Wastewater Treatment with a High-Performance Aeration Blower System

By Sam Gooldy, Senior Manager, Marketing and Product Development, UCA

In a strategic move to enhance environmental sustainability and operational efficiency, Universal Compressed Air (UCA) partnered with a leading waste services provider in the Southeast to design, build, own, operate and maintain a state-of-the-art blower System for wastewater pond aeration. This innovative solution, part of a five-year agreement, delivers over 20,000 scfm of low-pressure air while guaranteeing uptime, performance and significant cost savings.

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Dual Point Aeration Blower Control

By Tom Jenkins, President, JenTech Inc.; Jun Inai, Senior Design and Project Engineer, and Hayato Sakamoto, Principal Project Leader, Kawasaki Heavy Industries

Historically, the most common dual point control has been combining inlet guide vanes and variable discharge diffuser vanes. These are both mechanical systems and predate the availability of economical variable speed control. Recent advances in power electronics technology and improved VFD economics have led to implementing other combinations for dual point control. These include combining VFD control with either VDVs or IGVs.

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Advanced Aeration Control for Blowers

By Tom Jenkins, President, JenTech Inc.

The ideal blower control matches the blower airflow to the process demand. The process demand, in turn, must be established by the aeration control system. This control strategy has become standard practice in most treatment facilities because of its proven effectiveness in reducing energy consumption and improving process stability.

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Calculating Aeration Piping Friction Loss

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc.

In order to properly identify the performance requirements of a blower it is necessary to identify the inlet and discharge pressures. The friction losses in the inlet and discharge piping must be calculated to determine the total pressure requirement. This article details a simplified procedure for calculating piping losses.

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Aeration Blowers at Weftec 2023

By Roderick M. Smith, Editor, Blower & Vacuum Best Practices Magazine

Weftec 2023, a leading event for industrial and municipal wastewater treatment facilities took place October 2-5, 2023 at Chicago's McCormick Place. The objective of this article is to provide readers with a sampling of aeration blower technologies on display at the show. We regret not being able to include all exhibitors or visits made due to article length considerations.

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PD Blower Package Reliability

By Tom Jenkins, President, JenTech

High levels of reliability can be achieved in two ways. First, by design – employing quality materials, proven components, and simplified mechanisms. Second, by incorporating advanced monitoring techniques that identify abnormal operating conditions, provide notification to operators, and initiate equipment shutdown before catastrophic failure occurs. Modern positive displacement (PD) blower packages use both techniques to improve system reliability.

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U.K. Wastewater Treatment Plant Blows Away Inefficiency

By Sulzer

Derby Sewage Treatment Works handles wastewater for a population of 440,000, processing an average of 1’000 liters and a maximum 2,300 liters of effluent every second. After water has passed the inlet and mechanical screens, it gravitates into the primary settlement tanks, where solids settle as sludge at the bottom. The sludge is drawn off and anaerobically digested to produce renewable fuel, but liquid flows onto the activated sludge plant.

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Overcoming Aeration Turndown Limitations with Compressed Gas Mixing

By Sarah Elger, P.E., Director of Product Innovation & Strategy, and John Koch, P.E., Vice President of Technology, EnviroMix Inc.

When a facility plans for a wastewater treatment plants, they typically design based on population and industry growth twenty to thirty years into the future. Regulatory requirements often dictate designing the activated sludge process equipment based on future-state influent flow and loading conditions, resulting in decades of constrained, inefficient, and suboptimal operation.

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Design Tips for Aeration Blower Rooms

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc.

Supplying air to process equipment necessitates a system approach. Selecting the blowers is a critical design step, but far from the final one. The layout of the blower room and ancillary equipment is just as critical to project success as the blowers themselves.

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Extrapolating PD Blower Performance

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc.

Positive Displacement (PD) blowers have been a workhorse for wastewater treatment for over 150 years. They are robust and simple to operate. They are often the first choice for small facilities and for applications with wide variations in discharge pressure. When combined with variable frequency drives (VFDs) they provide operational flexibility in flowrate across a wide range of discharge pressures.

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Get the Most Out of Centrifugal Blower Control Upgrades

By Jeremiah Brown, BSEE/BSCE

Single-stage centrifugal blowers are a proven technology that have been around for many years and will probably be here for many years to come. A well maintained machine can last for decades and will likely outlast its original control system. Even if the control system is still in good working order the components might already be end of life and hard to replace if any of them fail. If you are thinking about modernizing the hardware (PLC / HMI / Instruments) this is also a great opportunity to make the system a little smarter and user friendly.

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Measuring Blower Airflow Rates with Calibrated Ammeters

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc.

One definition of “calibrate” is “to determine, rectify, or mark the graduations of something”. An ammeter is an instrument for measuring electric current. Therefore the simple definition of a calibrated ammeter is a current measuring device marked with units of measure, presumably amperes. In the blower industry, however, the term has developed a specific meaning. A calibrated ammeter is an instrument that measures a blower motor’s current draw and converts the measurement to a display of blower airflow rate.

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Kansas WRRF Aeration Blower Upgrades Save 40% in Energy Costs

By Mike Grennier, Blower and Vacuum Best Practices Magazine

The plant recorded another win in its long list of accomplishments when it replaced aging multistage blowers with high-speed integrally geared blowers in 2020. The new blowers with Variable Frequency Drive (VFD) control are credited with a 40% reduction in energy consumption for aeration. This results in an annual savings of $35,000. The blower upgrade, which also helps protect the safety of employees, is expected to deliver a payback of less than five years.

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Specification Considerations for ASME PTC 13

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) released their Wire-to-Air Performance Test Code for Blower Systems in 2018. Designated PTC 13-2018, it has rapidly become a standard for inclusion in blower specifications.

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Continuing Education at the Best Practices 2021 EXPO & Conference

By Roderick Smith, Publisher, Best Practices Magazines and EXPO

The EXPO & Conference focuses on “Optimizing On-site Utilities Powering Automation.” Experts from all over the world convened to discuss compressed air, pneumatics, motors and drives, vacuum, aeration blower and chiller/cooling and water treatment systems. Held November 2-4, 2021, this 3rd installment of the event continued to provide continuing education, certification and networking opportunities to equipment sales engineers, engineering firm and manufacturing plant personnel.

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Controlling DO: A Good Average Isn’t Good Enough

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc.

Most control systems use Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) algorithms for controlling DO, basin air flow distribution, and blower pressure or flow. These algorithms are prone to hunting - the cyclic fluctuation of the controlled variable. Fluctuations that oscillate the DO several mg/L above and below the target DO concentration are common.

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Considerations for Temporary Blower Air at a Wastewater Treatment Facility

By Matt Piedmonte and Scott Werner, Aerzen Rental USA

This article aims to discuss the various technologies of equipment that could be presented to a wastewater operator faced with a temporary need for blower air and to help the operator understand the impact (both monetarily through a “Total Cost of Rental” approach and environmentally) of their decisions.

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Aeration Blower Control Strategies

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc.

Real world blower applications rarely operate at steady state design conditions. There are a variety of reasons for this. Designs usually include a margin of safety to accommodate unforeseen conditions. Typically, the process demand itself is variable, requiring a corresponding ability to modulate the blower flowrate.

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Design Engineering a WWTP Expansion with Unique Site Constraints

By Sam Werner P.E., Jones|Carter and Jacob Valentien P.E., Pacheco Koch

A small site located within a floodplain, prone to erosion, and currently occupied by an existing in-service wastewater treatment facility is not at the top of any engineer’s list for a desirable site to expand a wastewater treatment plant or reclamation facility. However, these challenges created opportunity for specialized solutions during the design of the facility expansion; in particular, in designing the aeration and digester blower system.

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Measuring Blower Airflow in the Field

By Tom Jenkins, JenTech Inc., and John Conover, Air Clean USA

Most electric utilities offer customer incentives for implementing energy conservation measures (ECMs) Incentive programs pay customers to use less energy. In some cases they are mandated by legislation and in others the incentives are driven by the utility’s desire to avoid building new generating capacity. Some incentives are based on reduced energy use (kWh) and some are based on lower peak demand (kW).

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