How to Get the Maximum Benefit Out of Your Process Filtration: Series Intro
In today’s refining and chemical manufacturing environments, the devil is always in the details. Choosing the right process design and the right equipment to ensure you’re operating efficiently without significant downtime is always a challenge. Your organization’s reputation, product quality, worker safety, and cost control are on the line all day, every day. That’s why we’re focused on how to get the maximum benefits from process filtration systems in this informative blog series. Over the next several weeks, we’ll take you in-depth on many of the tangible and intangible benefits of upgrading to a high-performance filtration system, as well as many of the hidden costs associated with legacy filtration systems. For our customers, a significant disruption to production is not something they ever want to experience. That’s why we want to educate you on how to get the right equipment in place for your process based on data driven decisions.
What We Will Cover In This Series About Process Filtration
1. Save your operating dollars
Excessive maintenance and downtime is time spent and money lost. We’re surprised to see many of the new customers we speak to are taking down their filtration system for cleaning on a regular basis, sometimes on a daily interval. By making the upfront investment on a clean in place (CIP) backwashable filtration system, you can easily achieve years worth of production without ever having to take down the filter.
2. Save your workers
With what we know today about the impact on one’s health after prolonged exposure to hazardous chemistry, companies should be doing everything in their power to improve the safety of their operators. Mechanical filtration technologies, such as filter presses, need regular operator intervention and routine manual cleaning to continue running. Why not have all that controlled, on a completely closed loop system, from the safety of a control room?
3. Save your catalyst
This one is for the people out there spending 6, sometimes 7, figures on catalyst, particularly catalysts such as platinum or palladium. At the time of me writing this, palladium is over $1,300 an ounce. Why settle for an inferior filtration technology that’s capturing ~80-90% of your catalyst when you can invest into better filtration and capture >99% for recycling and reclamation? This investment would pay for itself in as little as a few months.
4. Save your throughput revenue
The throughput of mechanical filtration technologies is often capped by pressure or maintenance issues. Many of our new customers achieve 50-200% throughput increases due to upgrading to a self-cleaning, high pressure filter.
5. Save your company’s reputation
Getting bad batches of product? Your product not as pure as you’d like it to be? Modern filtration systems can be designed to achieve sub-micron filtration to help you meet or exceed your rigorous internal and external quality and purity standards. Modern filtration systems also provide consistent, single pass filtration, which eliminates many issues that could cause batch to batch variation.
6. Save your downstream equipment
You have expensive equipment downstream that simply can’t afford to be destroyed by contaminants that should’ve been caught by your filter. Sure, you can go invest in another guard filter, but why should you? Stop making excuses for your primary filter and have it accomplish the job you paid for it to do.
7. Save your job
This might be a sore subject, I know. As someone who’s had to manage multi-million-dollar projects in which I had to make tough decisions on suppliers, which I didn’t always get right, I understand the pressure of managing large budgets and how one wrong decisions can adversely affect you. The difference between hero and zero is the amount of pre-work and research that goes into your decisions. Having the data to support those decisions is critical. If someone is willing to sell you process equipment without knowing the details of your process, that person does not have your best interest in mind. Take the time and work with suppliers who want to work with you, not sell you.
Stay Tuned for More
We’ll be releasing in-depth blogs on each of the aforementioned topics. Smooth operations, increased productivity, exceptional product quality, safe working environments, profitability, and stellar brand reputations are what we are in the business of working with our customers to deliver.
If you’d like to talk more about the maximum benefits you and your company can derive from process filtration, and explore starting with a simple filtration test, I’d love to talk. You can count on me to listen to your process and provide advice tailored to your unique situation. Feel free to shoot me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn and if you have questions.
In the meantime, we’ve talked quite a bit about gathering data to design your filtration system, so check out our video on filter feasibility testing by using this link. Look forward to connecting with many of you and wishing you all the best for 2019.
By: Patrick Hill
Title: Lead Project Engineer
