Air Compressor Storage Tank Sizing

A simple and straightforward rule for sizing an air receiver tank for a reciprocating air compressor is to take the tool with the highest cfm requirement at the required psi multiply that cfm requirement by 1 25 or 1 5 and then round up to the closest gallon size.

Air compressor storage tank sizing.

Air tanks how large should i size my air tank. For example if all needed tools require 20 cfm for a maximum of 15 minutes per hour then the minimum volume is 20 cfm x 15 min 300 cubic feet. A good rule of thumb for most applications is to have three to five gallons of air storage capacity per air compressor cfm output. If you have a 1 gallon air tank and the air compressor is set to shut off at 90 psi when the compressor stops you will have 1 gallon of air pressurized to 90 psi.

Use the total airflow requirement and estimate the amount of time a maximum air capacity will be needed. The ideal ratio of compressed air storage is 1 3 wet to 2 3 dry capacity. For example if you have a total of 1 200 gallons of compressed air storage 800 gallons should be dry storage and 400 gallons should be wet. So if your air compressor is rated for 100 cfm you would want 300 to 500 gallons of compressed air storage.

So the minimum air required is 300 cubic feet. Sizing an air compressor requires a logical sequence of steps to determine the proper amount of air for the application. It is recommended to have a minimum of 2 gallons of storage per every cfm and we highly recommend having 4 gallons of storage per cfm. For most applications it makes sense to have a combination of wet and dry storage.

That requires more airflow therefore a bigger tank can store a larger volume of air industrial compressors can have air tanks as big as 60 gallons or more.