The Advantages of Containerized Blast Rooms

Blasting is an essential process for surface preparation, typically requiring large spaces with comprehensive ventilation.

Traditional blast enclosures use heavy-hinged doors that can take up valuable space inside the facility.

Convenience

Blast rooms offer a large enclosure where operators can perform abrasive blasting without releasing dust into the environment around them. This self-contained workspace helps eliminate environmental impact and streamlines surface preparation. This type of blasting also promotes productivity, safety, and quality standards.

To maintain visibility, blast rooms are outfitted with ventilation systems that provide clean airflow and abrasive media recovery systems that move and filter dust that is swept up during the process. The abrasive media is then transferred into a feed hopper connected to the blast pot, where it can be recycled for use again.

The blast pot is the pressurized vessel that combines compressed air with abrasive materials like steel shot, grit, aluminum oxide, and glass beads, and the media is then accelerated through an end nozzle. Mechanical abrasive recovery systems with lift buckets and augers may be used for more significant blast production and high-production applications. These systems physically convey the used abrasive material into a recycling system that separates and filters out the fine dust particles, returning the suitable abrasive to the blast pot.

Environmentally Friendly

Blast rooms provide a fully enclosed environment where blasting can occur without the dust and debris escaping into the work area. This containment significantly reduces airborne contamination, protects worker health and safety, and prevents environmental pollution.

A blast room’s containment also helps significantly reduce noise levels, which can benefit residential or noise-sensitive applications. Additionally, blast rooms can be equipped with advanced dust collection and filtration systems that minimize airborne contaminants and dust while increasing productivity.

These containment measures can significantly improve media utilization efficiency, reducing purchasing and disposal costs for those blasting with reusable media, like crushed glass grit or plastic shot. In addition, many blast rooms come equipped with abrasive media recovery systems that use sweepers, air jets, moving floors, and other mechanisms to physically convey used blast media from the floor of the blast chamber back into the recycling system. This ensures that only high-quality blast media is used for the next blasting operation, saving time and money.

Versatility

Blast rooms can be outfitted with a variety of blasting equipment. Depending on the workpiece size, abrasive type, and production rates, the blast room can be modified with various blasting systems to accommodate all blasting projects.

Safety

Designed to house blast equipment and allow for 360-degree blasting safely, blast rooms offer the control needed to ensure consistent surface preparation for coatings. Combined with waste management and recovery systems, these self-contained units help streamline the abrasive blasting for various applications, including aerospace, automotive, construction, shipbuilding, road haulage, and more.

Blast rooms are usually equipped with a dust collection system that ventilates and moves airborne abrasive debris out of the room. This process maintains visibility and helps reduce the amount of dust that can affect the operator.

Traditionally, blast enclosures were outfitted with heavy-hinged doors that swung open to allow personnel and equipment into and out of the workspace. While durable, these types of doors can be slow to fit and require substantial facility real estate when swung open – even standard 16″ wide doors can use up to 135 square feet of space.