The compressed air discharged from an air compressor is hot. Compressor air at these temperature contains large quantities of water in vapor form. As the compresed air cools this water vapor condense into a liquid form. As an example if an aftercooler is not used, a 200scfm compressor operating at 100psig introduce 15 gallons of water into the compressed sysyem each day.
The aftercooler should be located as close as possible to the discharge of the compressor.

Air cooled after coolers use ambient air to cool the hot compressed air. The compressed air enters the air cooled after cooler. Theair travels through either finned tubes or corrugated aluminum sheets of the after cooler while ambient air is forced over the cooler by a motor-driven fan. The cooler, ambient air removes heat from the compressed air.

A water-cooled pipe line aftercooler comes in different styles. The most common style for compressed air service is a Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger/Aftercooler (fig. AC1-3). The pipe line aftercooler consists of a shell with a bundle of tubes fitted inside. The tubes used are high quality copper / cupro nickel/ SS/ carbon steel as per user's requirement. All flanges and tube sheets conform to ANSI B 16.5 standards. The capacity of the after coolers are ranging from 10 CFM to 10,000 CFM working pressure up to 150 kg/cm² (g) which will be ready for installation with air / gas inlet/outlets and water inlet/outlet nozzles.