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depth filtration
23 March 2009
Ken Sutherland
Clarification
There are two prime purposes for filtration: either to recover the solids suspended in the fluid being filtered, in as
concentrated a form as possible, or to remove any suspended solid from a fluid, as completely as possible (although it
is frequently desirable to combine both purposes). The recovery process usually deals with fairly concentrated feed
suspensions, and proceeds by means of cake filtration. The clarification process, on the other hand, usually involves the
removal of contaminants from the feed liquid, with the suspended solids in fairly low concentrations.
It is clarification that is the main function of depth filtration, for which its mechanism is well suited, with its ability to
remove particles considerably smaller than the average pore diameter in the filter medium. An important feature of
clarification filters is their ability to hold a significant quantity of trapped solids before they become blocked and must be
cleaned or replaced. With the very common flat sheet filter media this aim is achieved by pleating the sheet, or
arranging in some other way, that the largest possible area of medium can be packed into the volume of the filter
housing.
Depth filters, by contrast, achieve their dirt-holding capability by means of the thickness of their media, frequently with
pore sizes that are graded to be smaller in the direction of fluid flow, so that coarser particles are trapped first. This is
achieved in two very different types of depth filter: the deep bed (or sand) filter, and the thick medium filter. Any
clarification filter (other than the self-cleaning types) will eventually become full of trapped solid, at which point the filter
must be cleaned, by backwashing or chemically or replaced.
The cartridge may also be made from a continuous multi-filament yarn wound at an angle around a core, to give a
spirally wound medium. Alternatively, thick sheets of material, woven, nonwoven or bonded, may be cut, wrapped
around a core and joined at the long edge.
However the depth filter medium is made, there is considerable scope for building in to the resultant filter element the
required filtration efficiency, flow resistance and dirt-holding capacity, by the proper choice of basic fibre or granule size
and shape.
Applications
As has already been implied, the job of the depth filter is very largely that of the removal of small quantities of unwanted
suspended material from a fluid flow where that fluid may be the product of a process, or a feed to a process, or a
waste stream that must be cleaned before it may be discharged into the environment. It is rare that the separated solid
is anything other than a waste material (whose quantity has hopefully been minimised before arrival at the depth filter),
so that any cleaning process for the filter element will be designed to restore its original filtration characteristics as far as
possible, rather than to retrieve the accumulated solids.
In the case of the deep bed filters, the application is almost all in the clarification of drinking and process water, where
they are very widely used, and in the polishing of waste waters before discharge, both in municipal treatment works, and
on industrial sites. The potentially important use for cleaning hot exhaust gases is well worthy of note, but is nowhere at
the scale of deep bed use for water.
Thick media filters are used in almost every industrial process, mainly, but by no means entirely, in the cleaning of
liquids. They are used for maintaining the integrity of hydraulic and pneumatic systems, and for cleaning machine tool
coolant. In a vastly numerous range of individual applications, thick media filters provide the required liquid clarity as
feed to membrane processes, as products in the food and beverage, and fine chemicals and toiletries sectors.
Biotechnology
In the majority of biochemical manufacturing processes, a fermentation process either produces a valuable product
secreted from the cell during the reaction, or retained in the cell after the reaction. When the larger fragments are
removed, usually by centrifugation, before or after the cell wall is broken, there is a vital clarification task to be
performed, on extremely costly suspensions. Depth filters are proving adept at this task 2 and 3, enabling the fermentation
products to be prepared quickly, cleanly and with high production rates. They are also important in the provision of the
various feed media for bioreactors, the range of depth filters used as prefilters being very wide.
An important development in this sector is the move towards single-use filters, to avoid any risk of cross-contamination.
This greatly helps with process validation costs, as it ensures that sterile filters are used every time. The economics of
biotechnology are such that the costs of using disposable filters are small compared with the process savings.
References
1 Derek B Purchas and Ken Sutherland, Handbook of Filter Media (2nd Edition), Elsevier Advanced Technology (2002).
2 Mahesh Prashad & Klaus Tarrach (2006), Filtration+Separation, 43, September, 2830.
3 Mandar Dixit & Ulrich Brutigam (2007), Filtration+Separation, 44, July/August, 24-6.
(http://www.filtsep.com/view/841/filtration-overview-a-closer-look-at-depthfiltration/)