Everything You Wanted to Know About Blast Room Ductwork!

A customer ordered a Titan Blast Room and decided to save money by handling the ductwork themselves. This meant they fabricated and installed it.

Bad news. They ran into several issues, which delayed their blast room installation. Instead of saving money, they lost money, plus the time that could have been spent blasting.

Material thickness is crucial

The steel used for blast room ducting is much thicker than HVAC ducting and for a good reason: Abrasive media dust.

It’s no secret that media blasting creates dust, which is quite abrasive. When traveling at high velocity, it quickly destroys the thin material used for HVAC ducting.

For this reason (and others), Titan fabricates the heavy-duty ductwork used for our blast room applications (Figure 1).

Correct sizing is needed for proper airflow

Using the incorrect size (or diameter) ducting can speed up or slow down the airflow. Too slow and you won’t properly ventilate the blast room. Too fast and the airflow becomes destructive due to the abrasive dust.

Creating too many 90-degree elbows can significantly reduce airflow as well. Figure 2 shows an installation the customer did themselves, including fabricating their own ducting – with four elbows.

Figure 3 shows Titan fabricated ducting utilizing long radius elbows. Long radius elbows give less frictional resistance – providing much better airflow than standard elbows.

Location, location, location

Since ducting is exterior to the blast room, it’s very important to consider ceiling beams, lights, and the ceiling height itself when locating your blast room (Figure 4).

And, even though our cartridge dust collector is the best on the market, a blast room is still a noisy and dusty place, so you want to be sure to locate yours away from people working, including machining equipment, manufacturing lines, paint booths, or offices.

As part of our blast room installation service, we provide you with an engineered layout drawing, which shows the locations of electrical and air drops, as well as equipment and ductwork configuration for your signed approval.

For additional blast room installation tips, be sure to read “Preparing for a Titan Blast Room Installation.”