Martin Engineering has launched a digital system for industrial air guns to improve efficiency, reliability and performance.
In mines, air cannons use timed blasts of compressed air to remove clogged material from chutes, improving flow and reducing downtime. But according to Brad Bronchinski, Martin’s global air cannon product manager, operators have few tools to monitor cannon efficiency. “Air cannons have been around for more than 50 years, but until now there has been no reliable way for station operators to understand how effectively they actually perform as a sequence,” Bronchinsky said in a press release.
The company’s new N2 Air Cannon Intelligence System (ACI) is designed to address this problem. The system uses battery-powered nodes mounted directly on the air cannon. These nodes communicate with a central cellular gateway via long-range radio frequencies. A single gateway can support more than 1,000 sensors across a site, according to the company.
“Many customers do not have the time or resources to continuously monitor air cannon performance,” Bronchinsky added. “ACI provides them with automatically actionable information, helping maintenance teams focus attention where it is really needed to keep critical material flow systems running reliably.”
The platform is designed to support reliability and efficiency, while minimizing labor waste when manually inspecting individual cannons, Martin said.
ACI operates independently of Wi-Fi or factory control networks and can usually be installed without shutting down the plant.
The new system will be on display in Derbyshire, UK at Hillhead 2026, from 23 to 25 June.
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