Contact: Nikolai Benz

Funding: AiF

Most products in the pharmaceutical or chemical industry are formed in suspensions like crystallization or precipitation. To separate the products from the liquid phase, the filtration is the most common step. After the filtration of these valuable products, the thermal drying of the products is the most expensive step. To reduce the amount of liquid in the filter cake before the thermal drying, the cheaper mechanical desaturation is used. Hereby a differential pressure is transporting the liquid out of the cake. The most common challenge is to prevent a gas throughput at the filter cloth. On the one hand, the differential pressure is reduced dramatically and the rest of the cake retains his moisture and on the other hand, solvents can reach the environment.
In the last decades, many investigations about a possible filter cloth without gas throughput were conducted but never reached the industrial scale.
In this project, a composite of a woven fabric and a polymeric membrane is developed to combine the advantages of the stable woven and the membrane which prevents the gas throughput. The firmly bonded combination of the materials will be realized by heat setting. After the determination of a possible material in lab-scale, the new filter composite material will be tested at a vacuum drum filter at technical scale.