Vacuum Motors Selection: Also where to buy and which ones?

[Adrielp]

Hello, I am an engineering student and the University of Arkansas. Me and my team are currently in the process of assembling a flowbench and we have quickly realized that the motors we have will not give us the proper flow and vacuum. I recently called and Ametek Rep to spec out the some vacuum motors to achieve the flow rate and vacuum we wanted and they told me it require 5 to 6 vacuum motors to achieve it. The suggesting using a centrifugal blow but the problem I found with those is the size. They are very big from what I've seen. We would like to go overkill on our flow bench so we would like to build something capable of achieving more than 28" inH2O and about 690cfm of flow. Our current project will be to test a cylinder head design but the flowbench will be kept in the dept for future use.

So I'm trying to find the most cost friendly option for the department since what we can spend will be limited.
So where should I look to purchase or get one? Anybody have any suggestions on which ones to buy?

Also, one other thought I had was to buy a vacuum and a blower and mount them together. Blow should achieve the cfm requirement, and a vacuum with a smaller orifice or better vacuum capacity should achieve the needed vacuum. The only thing I wonder about with that is how to go about mounting the blower. Would you need to let the discharged air blow through the top or the orifice plate in your tubing or would you just connect the inlet of the blower to the vacuum side of you tubing. I'm curious about this because I would assume the manufacturer specified flow rate refers to the cfm moving through the exit and not the cfm moving through the inlet.

[Brucepts]

Poke around this area of the forum http://www.flowbenchtech.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=15

Should answer a lot of your questions . . .