Air still wins on most of the factors except portability and sometimes cost.
Some of them are obvious. HVLP paint guns. Air blower nozzles. Tire inflation still is faster and more efficient with air on larger tires. Anti-spark tools like vacuums or ratchets something like that.
The industrial applications of air still far outstrip their electric counterparts. Material handling like suction cups, pneumatic cylinders and vibration motors are all used vs electric for their size, cool running and long lived service life. Tool changers on CNC machines are still largely pneumatic.
Any high speed motors like die grinders, drills and some machine spindles.
Compact size like tiny pencil grinders, die grinders, small saws, and reciprocal movement tools.
Compressed air holds a tremendous amount of energy that can be released suddenly so it is great for tools like nailers, air hammers, rivet guns, and other tools that need a sudden burst of force.
The economy of compressed air gets better as the size goes up. Yeah it takes. A lot of energy to compress air into a little pancake compressor for what you get, but when a factory is running 100’s of HP worth of compressor for the plant to run, the compressors can make more air per watt and you can use tools that would otherwise be unusable or wildly inefficient if they were electric.
A brewery I used to work at used compressed air to blast out spent grain from the lauter tun into a silo outside. Basically it was a 8” pipe that an auger would load up with big balls of grain then a pneumatic valve would open and blast the grain ball though the pipe outside, up 50 feet and into the top of the waste silo. We used to have an electrical auger system for this but it was very slow, fussy, would break frequently and was generally less efficient than the air. We ran a 1000 gallon buffer tank with a 2” supply line to the grain out cannon supplied by one of the 100hp screw compressors. Still better to use air than electric in this application.
