Standard cubic feet per minute

Okay kiddo, have you ever blown up a balloon before? When you blow up a balloon, the air you blow in comes out of your mouth at a certain speed, right? Now imagine that instead of blowing up a balloon, you are trying to move something really important, like air through a pipeline.

When people move air through a pipeline, they use something called "standard cubic feet per minute," or SCFM for short. This may sound like a big word, but it just means how much air is being moved per minute. But there's a catch: the amount of air that counts as one "standard cubic foot" depends on a few things, like the temperature and pressure of the air.

So, to measure how much air is moving, people use a special tool called a flow meter. The flow meter measures how much air is moving through the pipeline in one minute, and then calculates how much air that is in "standard cubic feet." That way, everyone can agree on how much air is moving, no matter what the temperature or pressure is like.

So think of SCFM like blowing up a balloon. Just like how you need to blow up a certain amount of air to fill up a balloon, people need to move a certain amount of air to get their job done. And like how much air you can blow into a balloon depends on how fast you blow, how much space you have, and how much you fill up the balloon, measuring how much air is moving through a pipeline depends on temperature, pressure and flow rate.