Engineering Custom Filtration Solutions
Providing solutions, not products, is in our DNA. Though the temptation to align our business model with the market perception that filters are commodities is present, we continue to affirm our legacy as a boutique filtration-engineering firm that provides solutions to customers that are as unique as their challenges.
Taking advantage of this approach asks you to embrace customization. Engineering Custom Filtration Solutions, rather than a lowest first cost consumer mind-set. Operational reliability and low operating cost will provide the payback to the products and services we provide giving you longevity and value of performance beyond your cost of ownership.
This section is intended to conceptualize filtration in general, as much as to inform you about the way we prefer to do business. Like the perpetual motion machine, zero-point energy, atomic fusion, and clean coal--the fully automated, self-cleaning, constant pressure and throughput filter does not exist. Each of our models offers an optimum solution to specific aspects of filtration, while sacrificing others. Any vendor who claims otherwise has failed to filter their spin.
Filtration Area
The first step to solving any filtration problem is determining the square feet of filtration surface and cubic feet of cake capacity that are required to achieve a specified throughput. To begin to approximate an answer, compare your situation to clean water, which flows through the typical filter at a rate of one gallon per square foot per minute. Provide and conceptualize with scale able data.
- Particle size, constituency and particle size distribution
- Percentage solids
- viscosity of your product
- temperature
- chemical compatibility
- throughput requirement
- flux rate
Our application data sheet (<<<click to download) asks for crucial information as a starting point. From there we can work together to properly size and configure a filter to meet your process goals.
Horizontal Or Vertical
In addition to filtration surface area, we need to decide whether your optimum solution requires horizontal or vertical filter plates. The trade-off is between stability, flexibility, and granularity – horizontal plate filters – and surface area/footprint-cost – vertical plate filters.
If your process is continuous, involves footprint constraints, requires automation, and demands minimal first cost, vertical plate technology could be ideal. If your process is discontinuous, requires absolute granularity filtration, has no critical footprint or labor constraints, and cost can be amortized, horizontal plate technology might be preferred.
We provide horizontal plate cartridges with the following diameters in inches: 8, 18, 33, and 44, in combinations that offer from 3.5 to 294 ft2 of filtration surface, which can hold from <6.5 to >708.5 lbs. of cake weight. Our vertical plates range from 25 to 3000 ft2. These numbers acquire significance only in the context of your specific application.
Whether you call it a pressure filter, leaf filter, vertical pressure filter, vertical pressure leaf filter, horizontal filter or horizontal leaf filter a general description of Sparkler’s® configurations follow:
- Horizontal Plate Filters (HPF) have a horizontal plate configuration with a vertical shell
- Vertical Filters (VF) have vertical filter plates with a vertical shell
- MCRO filters have vertical filter plates with a horizontal shell
- Nutsche filters have a single horizontal plate or basket in a vertical shell
Construction Material
We have constructed filter vessels from Carbon Steel, all varieties of Stainless Steel, Hastelloy, Titanium, Monel, Copper, Iron, Nickel and unique combinations for wetted and non-wetted components. Again, material matters only in the context of your problem. We have fabricated filter plates from all of the above materials and Polypropylene.
Construction Design
Every filter may be outfitted with a heat/coolant jacket to decrease product viscosity, drying and other process aspects related to temperature control. Depending on design and material, temperature may range from 20F to 3500F. Every vessel may be piped and flanged to accommodate any installation requirement.
Pressure Capacity
We build vessels designed for up to 1,400 psi, and plates that withstand 150 psi differential across medium surface. If your application requires greater tolerances, we welcome the challenge of building a solution.
End-Cycle Discharge
Most models use air, nitrogen, or some other pressurized gas to force end cycle filtrate through the system, assuring maximum batch filtration and economic return. If filter aid precoat and body feed are used, the end-cycle discharge phase dries accumulated cake. This result makes the manual cleaning of horizontal plate filters more user friendly and enables vibratory dry cake discharge of vertical plate models.
Media Material
Back in the day, Sparkler Filters® were touted for their capacity to use virtually every filter media in existence. Indeed, media was regarded as so critical to the process the company adopted a sort of Swiss Army Knife attitude towards its products; since each model worked well with the five major media used at the time, it should be considered as five filters in one. Nothing has changed. Our horizontal plate filters have been built to accommodate every media currently available, including every paper, cloth, membrane, screen, and every filter aid, including diatomaceous earth, cellulose, Perlite and Dicolite.
Vertical plate filters are not designed with filter paper in mind. Applications allowing wet cake discharge may use various grades of filter media to achieve increasingly granular separation. Applications requiring dry cake discharge are restricted to using grades of wire mesh. The choice is determined by method of discharge: cloth responds well to WCD/sluicing; mesh to DCD/vibration.
Achieving excellence...
With this general information in mind, our L-1000 lab filter and other rental units are available for scale able testing. We recommend conducting experiments if your filter application is challenging and you do not have reliable data, for the purpose of determining how much your application varies from our reference standard of water, whose characteristics are one gallon per minute per square foot; flux rate of 1 gpm/ft2. Together we can zero in on a solution that will remove variability from your filtration process.
From inception, Sparkler Filters Inc.® has never operated like a mass producer, instead we create custom equipment. We are an OEM; an original equipment manufacturer. The product that you require to best meet your goals doesn’t exist… …yet. We design and then manufacture what you need one component at a time, assemble these components and provide you with a finished product that will serve your company into the future.
