Blastwheel or compressed air shot blasting

What is shot blasting?

Shot blasting is the projection of an abrasive onto a surface, mechanically or using air or a fluid, to remove debris, enhance the product’s properties, and/or create the desired surface finish.

Here are the 2 main systems used to project the abrasive:

Compressed air blasting and water jet sandblasting:

The method involves moving an abrasive or a shot over a surface using air or water at very high pressure, through a hose. The fluids are air or water. Generally, this mixture is projected using a set of compressors, a blast pot, flexible hoses, and a nozzle (i.e.: Clemco, Empire, Schmidt, etc.). The main advantage of compressed air blasting is that it is a low-cost way to clean and prepare surfaces, in an industrial environment or outdoors. It also produces a concentrated blasting surface.

Turbine blasting:

A turbine blaster uses a motor to propel abrasive materials at high speeds for effective cleaning or surface preparation. It’s also called Wheel blast or Wheelabrator. It converts energy from a motor into the abrasive’s kinetic energy, through the rotation of the impeller. Its main advantages are its speed, its ability to project a large volume of abrasive, its efficiency, and its ability to clean large parts.

Shot Blasting Applications

How abrasives are used in your shot blast applications

From creating profiles, removing sand from casting to reinforcing metal parts, abrasive media supports many shot blast applications.

To help categorized these shot blasting applications, we have grouped them into 5 different categories, which are: Cleaning, Preparation, Peening, Cutting and finally, miscellaneous applications requiring an abrasive media.

Cleaning involves removing sand and scale from surfaces, preparing them for further processing in industries like foundries and mills.

Preparing is a treatment process that increases the adhesion to the surface in order to apply a coating: adhesive, paint, etc.

Peening is the process of working the surface of a metal to improve its material properties, in our case mechanically, by shot blasting (also known as cold working process)

Cutting is the name used to define the application of cutting blocks of granite and other hard stones with the use of Gang Saw machines.

Distinct: There are many other applications using various steel abrasive media, to name a few: ballast, radiation shielding, anti-slip additive, cored wire, incinerator and heat exchanger cleaning systems …