Season 2, Episode 1, of the SAF Magazine/Biodiesel Magazine podcast features John Worrell, vice president of sales at Filtration Technology Corporation, a leader in filtration and separation systems. During the podcast, Worrell discusses the design, features and application of the company’s Invicta liquid-solids filter cartridges.

Q: Tell us about Filtration Technology Corporation. 
Worrell: FTC is a Houston-based filtration company, specializing in high-efficiency pleated medias in four primary categories—those being liquid-solids separation, gas-solids filtration, liquid-liquid separation and gas-liquid separation. The company was founded by John Hampton in 1987, specializing in the oil and gas industry, and subsequently has grown to more downstream processes, including gas treatment, refining and even food and beverage.

Q: FTC changed the shape of traditional cylinder filters. Why did the company do that? 
Worrell: First of all, it’s important to understand that filter performance can be directly tied to usable surface area. All things being equal, the more usable surface that you have in a given system, the more dirt a filter will hold, and the higher efficiency a filter will have at removing a given contaminant size. This can be proven via Darcy’s Law, which we use to calculate flow through any porous media. We know according to Darcy’s Law, that dirt-holding capacity is indirectly proportional to flux rate, or flow per unit area. So, the more surface area that a cartridge has, the more contaminants a cartridge can hold. Over the years, many traditional cylinder cartridge designs have been modified to try to pack as much surface area as you can get into a given cylindrical cartridge. And that’s been done through increased pleat count, tighter pleat spacing, putting taller pleats in a cartridge, or even staggering the pleat heights, which we call W pleats, in diameters ... all in order to maximize the amount of surface area in a given cartridge ... So, there has been a lot of variations in cartridge diameters ... in the attempt to try to improve the amount of surface area in a given housing. Now, there is a problem with the cylindrical design, and it’s that all things being equal, your pleats will also be spaced tighter at the ID than they are at the OD. This can result in a partial use of the surface area at the ID, because the pleats get so close together that the dirt does not quite penetrate down into the ID of the cartridge—we call that tip loading. In other words, the contaminate doesn’t fully load throughout the surface area of the cartridge, so therefore, you pay for surface area that you don’t fully utilize ... subsequently, with cylindrical designs, you can only get so many cartridges in a given vessel design no matter what diameter you use, because you can only fit so many circles within a circle. Therefore, you have wasted space in the vessel. This is where the Invicta design comes in—we’ve solved two fundamental problems.

Listen to the full podcast by tuning in at www.biodieselmagazine.com/pages/podcasts