Chosing the Right Industrial Strainers for Wet Scubber Systems
If you’re using a wet scrubber for air pollution control, you know how they work: They capture flue gas particulate matter in liquid, dissolve it, and then separate it from the capturing liquid, recirculating treated liquid for future efforts.
This process inevitably involves pumps, which need to be protected from the abrasive, erosive particulate matter that wet scrubbers capture, transport, and separate. Industrial strainers are placed upstream from pumps in wet scrubber systems to protect them from particulate matter as well as unanticipated materials that might wreck machinery — such as wrenches, nuts, and bolts accidentally dropped during maintenance.
When selecting an industrial strainer for your wet scrubber system, it’s important not only to consider the material that the strainer will strain but also the surrounding environmental conditions since wet scrubbers operate in harsh environments with corrosive chemicals.
If an industrial strainer isn’t built to endure in those sorts of situations, you’ll have to replace it more often than you would like. And, in the worse case scenario, it could fail — making the pump it protects vulnerable to errant particulate matter, leaks, or depressurization.
So what type of industrial strainer is best suited to protect your wet scrubber system? Traditionally, industrial strainers have been made out of metal. But the corrosive conditions inherent to many wet scrubber systems make them hostile to metal industrial strainers — even those made out of stainless steel or specialty allows such as Hastelloy.
A more enduring approach to industrial strainer construction is to use non-metallic materials such as fiberglass. To understand why, let’s first take a closer look at the conditions present in most wet scrubber systems.
Wet Scrubber Systems Conditions
Wet scrubbers are used in all sorts of industrial facilities, including grain processing plants, food manufacturers, utility boiler rooms, and foundries. Designed to capture particulate matter such as soot, fly ash, and heavy dusts, they can also be used to filter water-soluble gasses such as hydrochloric acid (HCl) and ammonia (NH3).
Besides these materials, process exhaust gas can also contain pollutants such as carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOX) and sulphur oxides (SOX). While carbon monoxide has negligible corrosive effects on metals, nitrogen oxides can corrode metal and sulphur dioxide certainly does when it mixes with water to produce sulfurous acid.
If the industrial strainer serving your wet scrubber system has a metal body, it’s eventually going to give out under these sorts of conditions. This not only makes your system vulnerable to failure, it will also mean that you will have to purchase replacement industrial strainers more often.
What’s the solution? An industrial strainer built to endure abrasion and and that isn’t vulnerable to corrosion. Enter the non-metallic industrial strainer.
Non-Metallic Industrial Strainers
Under the conditions noted above, a metal-bodied basket strainer will quickly wear down. Not only will it suffer the abrasion caused by the particulate matter it strains out of the scrubber fluid, but it will also corrode due to the overall system’s hostile atmospheric conditions.
In contrast, industrial strainers made with petroleum-based materials — such as fiberglass and thermoplastics — that have been optimized for chemical and temperature resistance will stand a much better chance of enduring the harsh working conditions found in wet scrubber systems.
At Fluidtrol, we’ve developed a multi-laminate system for constructing industrial strainers, blending the best of fiberglass for structural integrity, thermoplastic pipe liners to resist the abrasive effects of the particulate matter in the scrubber fluid, and a gel resin outer coating that combats the wearing effects of environmental gases and other materials.
Available at a fraction of the cost of metal industrial strainers, non-metallic basket strainers such as our GX series can last up to 30 years in heavy industrial installations such as those involving wet scrubber systems.
To learn more about the enduring characteristics of our non-metallic industrial strainers, please contact us or call 888-551-9115.
