Hy-Pro's Factoryside Chat is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, and YouTube.

Hy-Pro's Factoryside Chat is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, and YouTube.

Demulsibility

What is Demulsibility?

Demulsibility is the ability of oil to separate from water. Oil and water naturally separate because like molecules attract each other. Oil sticks with oil, water sticks with water. Oil is "hydrophobic", or "afraid of water," which is a benefit when it comes to fluids like turbine oil. 

Extending Fluid Life Saves Money and Helps the Environment

Our mission is to make our customers as efficient as possible, and we achieve that with the highest quality filtration products and total system cleanliness strategies to maximize uptime, productivity and prevent costly fluid contamination related failures. Been there. Done that. Going to do it again tomorrow. But that's not the only way we make our customers efficient. Extending the useful life of in-service fluids pays big dividends in reliability, saves money on premature fluid replacement costs, and reduces the environmental impact of industry by reducing the amount of fluids used and discarded. Enhancing reliability, saving money, and protecting the environment are not only good business, they're our responsibility. To help reduce oil usage, let's first understand why fluids are condemned and prematurely replaced. 

ISO Cleanliness Codes Explained

The ISO Cleanliness Code (per ISO4406-1999) is used to quantify particulate contamination levels per milliliter of fluid at 3 sizes - 4µ, 6µ, and 14µ. It is expressed in 3 numbers (example 19/17/14) where each number represents a contaminant level code for the correlating particle size. The code includes all particles of the specified size and larger.It is important to note that each time a code increases, the quantity range of particles is doubling. Inversely, as a code decreases by one the contaminant level is cut in half. 

In the fascinating and fundamental field that is industrial fluid filtration, there exist many types of filter elements and many different types of media. In this article, we will briefly cover filter elements and the most common types of media they're made up of. The medias featured below include: cellulose, glass, wire mesh and water removal, coalesce and resin.

Throughout the first three entries in this series (find parts one, two and three), we've discussed the difference in two filter element testing methods, ISO16889 and DFE. We've also illustrated how many elements fall short of their stated beta ratio under dynamic flow conditions. Today we'll wrap it up with simulated cold-start tests.

DFE Multi-Pass: Cold Start Contamination Retention

Once the element has captured enough contaminant to reach approximately 90% of the terminal ΔP (dirty filter indicator setting), the main flow goes to zero and the injection system is turned off for a short dwell period. Then the main flow goes to maximum element rated flow accompanied by real-time particle count to measure retention efficiency of the contaminant loaded element. The dynamic duty cycle is repeated to further monitor the retention efficiency of the filter element after a restart.

Last week we covered the differences between the ISO16889 Filter Test Procedure and the DFE Filter Test Procedure. This week we illustrate the difference between elements engineered to retain particles during dynamic flow conditions and those that are engineered only to pass the ISO16889 test. (Looking for previous posts? Find parts one, two and four.)