Two percent points less moisture with XL-type high-performance vacuum disc filters

BOKELA GmbH, Product & Business Development, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

^* Corresponding author: jhahn@bokela.com

Abstract

Coal producers around the world are striving to improve profitability, minimize impact on environment and reduce carbon footprint by reducing the energy demand. A crucial component for this is the availability of cost- and energy-efficient filtration technology. Beside filter presses, high-performance vacuum disc filters are state-of-the-art technology in the dewatering of fine coal concentrates achieving a moisture content in the range of 20 to 30% (ar). The design of the high-performance vacuum disc filters has already pushed the limits by reducing internal losses in the filter system to a minimum and by increasing rotational speed to a maximum. This results in highest productivity with a given amount of energy. Now, the XL generation of high-performance vacuum disc filters is focusing on moisture reduction. Therefore, the filtration area is doubled, which leads to a moisture reduction of 2-3% w/w, while the footprint is only 10% higher. And this can put vacuum disc filters back into projects where pressure filtration has been considered. High-performance vacuum disc filters are simple to operate, have higher reliability, lower down time and significantly lower CAPEX. And in particular the far lower CAPEX can make the difference of a project going ahead or not.