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Like all airborne contaminates, wood dust can be damaging to your health. Solid wood particulates getting into your nose, throat, mouth and inner workings of your lungs and can cause issues from irritation of your nose, throat and mouth to breathing difficulties to asthma to physical damage to your lung tissue.

If you recall from our other blogs we have Inhalable and Respirable dusts (handy infographic below) and wood dust contains a lot of both.

respiratory system

Wood dust is also a broad term. A lot of different woods are used in industries of all levels across a wide range of machinery from simple hand tools and power tools to full blown CNC machines.

Be it hard woods – such as oak, cherry, iroko, maple, mahogany and teak, or softwoods such as cedar, pine, and spruce – all of them produce harmful dusts.

Different machining processes produce varying degrees of dust particulate sizes and amounts – remember a large portion of a dust cloud is too small for you to see. For example, sanding (be it by hand, with a power sander or on a machine) can produce large amounts of very fine dust that gets “thrown” into the air by the movement and action of the sander. This makes it a highly dispersed dust, meaning it can affect other people in the vicinity.

A mitre saw or rip saw can produce a lot of heavy chippings and “saw dust” that will fall to the floor and will be to heavy to be aerosolized – so you may think you are safe, but saws also produce a lot of high energy fine dust you can’t see that gets thrown out in the atmosphere as well.

Extraction for wood dust comes in many forms. We can provide on-tool extraction for things like electric hand sanders, dedicated dust collectors for chop saws and workshop machinery with filters and dust bags in.

We can also look at a centralised extraction system that connects to each work station via hoods, arms and ducts and vent the dust into an external dust collection unit.

The third option is to look at dedicated extraction work stations using an extraction bench. Extraction benches (also called down draft benches) have a heavy duty, perforated work surface on and drag air, and thus the dust, downwards through filters. The cleaned air is then blown back into the work place. This format can also be applied to an extraction wall – like the AirBench Vertex that creates a dust booth to clean the air of wood dust.

wood working banner

There is one other consideration with wood dust that not many people think about – Its combustible. Wood burns.

Put another log on the fire……

Wood dust is made up of a range of tiny dust particles in different sizes (fuel), mixed with air (oxygen), we put it into and extraction system – a pressurised and confined space with even more air (more oxygen) – add an ignition source, say a cigarette, a spark from a faulty tool, electrical fault….

The results can be catastrophic.

Extraction for wood dust, especially centralised LEV systems that take large amounts of wood dust to a large dust collection unit need to allow for the possibility of a dust fire.

We do this in several ways. If the dust is small amounts we can over saturate the extraction with lots of air – think throwing a match into a strong wind – we “blow” the fire out.

Other methods include removing potential ignitions sources. We can use spark proof fans, you can ensure all of your equipment is tested and in good working order, no smoking zones, fire awareness and more.

We can use explosive relief panels that direct an explosion away from people or we can use fire suppression such as inbuilt extinguishers.

The last two only work if a fire happens and the others aim at preventing the fire. There is no one fail safe way and a combination of the above should be used to prevent combustion or explosions from wood dust.

An example of a suitable unit with built in fire control is our LS500 dry dust extractor. Click on the image below for more information.

ls500e
Harm to your health from wood dust can take a long time to manifest. Don’t worry about 10yrs time, worry about now and protect yourself, your employees and colleagues today and get proper extraction.

Implementing proper dust extraction is easy. We have a wide range of dry dust extractors, extraction benches, dust booths and centralised extraction services, contact us to find out more information or to talk about your application and materials. we are always happy to help.

Contact us via the Contact Form or Email us or Call 01489 899070

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