Compressed air tools are used in all types of mines to ease the burden on miners, making work safer and increasing production dramatically. Pneumatic tools, like percussion and screw drills rock drills, coal mining drills, frame drills, telescopic rock drills, and air-actuated powered instruments, are commonly used by miners. Typical applications of compressed air in the mining industry include dewatering facilities powered by air-liquid lift systems, unloading cars, running direct-acting pumps, loading ore, filling cracks with cement, hauling, remotely ventilating areas, piling in mines, operating coal mine punches, chain machines, and radial coal cutters, spreading rock dust to prevent explosions, removing methane from mines to ensure safety (this gas can be sold to gas pipeline companies), and operating chiseling and drilling tools.
Textile industry
Compressed air is especially useful for cleaning looms, spindles and other equipment in cotton and woolen mills. Compressed air is used to clean machines such as presses and wood breakers during the trimming of cotton threads, as well as to provide pressure for baling. Humidification systems also use compressed air in their operation. In other textile mills compressed air is also used to mix, lift, and move dies, or to solve the problem of pumping water, humidifying goods, automatically controlling steam and water levels, starting engines, and running pressure accumulators. Compressed air is used to master the threads in the needle holes, allowing the tufts of blankets to be raised from 45 to 95 percent.
In hat factories, air jets are used to trim velvet hats and clean machines. Presses, like the irons used in many laundries, were also air-driven for flexible control and comfortable operation.
Compressed air is used to power cutting tools in the manufacture of women's intimate apparel, and there is a special use for expanding bras and padding.
A two-stage integrated drive rated at 4,000 scfm at 100 psig is in the central power station of a southern textile mill power plant that uses air-jet looms in the textile industry. A four-stage compression device of greater volume (4500 scfm) is used in another textile mill installation