Filtration Facts

World Cup Soccer And Filtration Both Benefit From Teamwork

Soccer stars Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, and Diego Maradona each gave brilliant individual performances in helping their World Cup soccer teams to win previous FIFA Cup championships. But they have been the exception rather than the rule. Soccer is a team sport, and the champion team is usually the one which plays most effectively as a unit. The same goes for NBA greats Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and  many others. While individuals might shine in a role, it is the ability to work together that makes a championship team "greater than the sum of its parts".

The same is often true when looking at industrial and process cooling systems. One component may appear to be the key, but it is the way in which other components maximize the effectiveness of each other that leads to a high performing system. A chiller, heat exchanger, or cooling tower may be the "pivotal player," but a properly-sized filtration system will keep all three operating longer, at higher efficiency and effectiveness, and with less maintenance. A championship combination. 

Multiple Separators On The Same Team
There are situations when multiple filtration systems installed in series are greater than the sum of their parts. And situations when the volume and concentration of solids in a liquid are so great that two Separators -- acting as a team -- are needed instead of one. In this type of installation (sometimes called a "Super Separator"), a high concentration of solids is best handled by having the first Separator remove the first cut of solids (typically the larger solids, which displace the smaller particles in the separation barrel), followed by the second Separator, which will then remove the typically smaller solids that carry-over into the second unit. This is all accomplished in a SINGLE pass.

Benefits of this ONE-TWO punch of filtration includes:

• Greater solids-removal capability for higher solids concentrations
• Improved fine particle removal (after the first-stage Separator reduces the overall solids load)
• Increased overall solids-removal of both large & unusual solids and finer solids
• As a result, a two-or-three staged "Super Separator" system is often the most effective solution when there is (a) a large amount of solids to be removed and (b) there is great variation in size and weight between the solids. 

Typical situations for this type of filtration configuration might include steel mills, mining applications, and other industrial processes.

Case Study: Separators Installed In Series
A typical example illustrating this situation might be a steel forging mill in Chile, using two Centrifugal Separators in series to remove huge amounts of sand from the process water used in their cooling towers. Want to read more? Download this Case Study and get the details!