Filters are essential in industry and in everyday life, to preserve machine functionality and for protection against toxic and allergenic substances.
The demands on filter efficiency, selectivity, capacity, and filter lifetime increase constantly and highly specialized solutions are needed for every filtration application. This is due to:

• The complex interplay of material properties of the filter media.
• The arrangement and shape of fibers in the medium.
• The physical and chemical properties of the fluid being filtered.
• The characteristics of the particles in the fluid.

The traditional way of designing, building, and testing filter prototypes is costly in time and resources.

Understanding and improving

Simulations with GeoDict help filter media makers and filter manufacturers understand and productively improve existing filter materials.

• Specify novel filter media characteristics
• Model filter media matching these specifications
• Determine properties of filter media, such as:
  • Grammage.
  • Largest through pore.
  • Multilayers.
  • Gradients.
  • Binder content, etc.
• Match computed properties to existing media by calibrating.
• Determine filtration properties of new media, including:
  • Initial pressure drop.
  • Single pass and multi pass filter efficiency.
  • Filter capacity.
• Improve new filter media by varying thickness, fiber diameters, gradient and compression, etc.

Through computer simulations, new filter media and filter pleats are engineered by honing in on a few promising designs and restricting costly lab tests to these few designs.

The GeoDict^® filtration package has been developed for the simulation of filtration processes. It includes interface tools to import and segment microCT and FIB/SEM data and material modeling modules to design 3D models from user-defined specifications, along with material property predictors to analyze them.

Simulated and computed parameters for improvement and design of filters in air, gas, and liquid filtration:

• Nonwoven fabrics, woven fabrics, foams, sintered ceramics, membranes, pleats and support meshes, wire and plastic meshes.
• Media thickness, fiber diameters, fiber orientation, grammage, pore size distribution, bubble point, percolation path.
• Single-Pass and Multi-Pass Tests, diesel soot test dust, standard aerosol test dusts, standard test dusts.
• Initial pressure drop, pressure drop evolution, initial filter efficiency, fractional efficiencies, filter capacity, filter class, and MPPS.
• Particle movement and particle deposition in the filter media, filter clogging behavior, and cake filtration.

^* The field of application determines the appropriate modules.