The Role of Filtration in Sustainable Manufacturing

Many industries are prioritizing eco-friendly practices in their operations for sustainable growth. Filtration systems are vital in sustainable manufacturing by keeping hydraulic systems and gas streams free of contaminants, increasing production efficiency and prolonging the service life of different systems and machines. Filters can also help your business comply with regulations by reducing waste and ensuring you operate sustainably.

Whether you use fluids or gases as fuels or in hydraulic systems, efficient high-pressure filters can be beneficial across industries such as aerospace, defense and wherever you need to ensure a product’s purity.

How Filtration Contributes to Sustainable Manufacturing

Using different types of efficient filtration systems can help you achieve more sustainable operations, including:

• Hydraulic filters: These capture any contaminants in your hydraulic fluid, including dirt, rust or sludge. This means pressure valves remain unblocked and moving parts remain free of tiny dirt particles. In turn, hydraulic systems are better lubricated and sludge is reduced, enabling better heat transfer. Your filter ensures your hydraulic-powered equipment operates as efficiently as possible, reducing energy use and prolonging the life of your machinery. Opt for stainless steel filters to keep your hydraulic fluid clean.
• Gas filters: Gas filters can remove dust and particulates from gas streams to ensure your equipment works reliably and lasts longer. Removing the natural impurities provides a purer gas, allowing for more efficient combustion, for example.
• Coalescing filters: A subset of gas filters, coalescing filters can remove tiny droplets of various gases and fluids from water to oil. This can help protect downstream parts from corrosion and promote production efficiency for more sustainable operations.

Each of these filters has many applications across industries but has many shared benefits when it comes to sustainable manufacturing.

Preserve Product Quality and Waste Reduction

Filters help ensure the purity of gases so that final products meet the highest quality standards. Hydrogen filters can help optimize the performance of hydrogen fuel cells by removing impurities like oxygen and carbon monoxide. This is crucial for creating pure hydrogen in fuel cells for use in power generation and fuel-cell vehicles.

You can also reduce waste by using efficient filtration systems. This is particularly true in food manufacturing, where preservative gases are used to help store and transport the products. Minimizing contaminants and microbes promotes proper food safety and seals in the freshness of the produce, reducing the potential for spoiled products.

Capture and Reuse Resources

Low-pressure filters in hydraulic systems enable oil to be collected, cleaned and reused when it returns to the reservoir. The quality of the hydraulic filter is paramount to ensuring your equipment continues to work effectively. Reusing oil reduces the need for virgin materials, and removing contaminants reduces potential wear, which means your equipment lasts longer.

Hydrogen systems are susceptible to boil-off, where cryogenic hydrogen gets heated and turns into a vapor. This can pose a safety risk in terms of pressure buildup, but can also mean wasted hydrogen. Filters can help recover the boil-off hydrogen gas, filtering any contaminants as it returns from vapor to liquid to maintain purity. This ensures resources are reused effectively, lessening the need for new gas.

Increase Efficiency

Using top-quality, efficient filtration systems can protect from the costs of downtime. In 2024, an hour of downtime in manufacturing cost $36,000 in fast-moving consumer goods, and $2.3 million an hour in the automotive industry. By freeing your hydraulic and pneumatic systems from contaminants, filters protect your equipment from prematurely wearing out and breaking down unexpectedly before maintenance schedules.

Filters can be also be used for pre-filtering new oil before adding it into your hydraulic system, prolonging your filters’ life. By decreasing downtime, you save on parts and the labor needed to fix equipment. With fewer particulates or contaminants, your equipment or vehicles can run more efficiently, which can be sustainable in terms of energy efficiency.

When you choose filters that have been tested for 99% efficiency, you invest in products that ensure your systems run as effectively as possible. Additionally, the filters may need less frequent replacements than your old ones, which again helps with waste reduction.

Safely Dispose of Waste Material

In the oil and gas industry, filters remove contaminants from waste material so that it can be safely disposed of without harming the environment. In addition, supporting equipment such as strainers and valves can help remove unwanted solids from fluids or gases to help with disposal.

Removing contaminants from oil and gas before burning prevents the global warming effects of burning substances such as carbon dioxide, sulfur or methane.

Comply With Regulations

Complying with various legislation and regulations around sustainable manufacturing is crucial for your business.

The Clean Air Act has standards for the acceptable levels of sulfur content and contaminants in the gas supply industry, for example. Filters can be used to control and meet these standards. This ensures any gases used comply with these regulatory and safety guidelines. Plus, by using filters to comply with regulations, you also protect your equipment since contaminants like sulfur can corrode pipelines.

By demonstrating compliance, your business also gains a competitive edge, as many customers are looking to source products made with sustainability in mind. You can add sustainability credentials to your branding to indicate that your operations meet environmental sustainability standards.

The Future of Filters in Sustainable Manufacturing

Technological advances mean that filters can be custom-made to fit your industry and your business’s specific needs. Keep up with the latest advances by partnering with a filter manufacturer that has tested filters to 99% efficiency, so you can find filters that are optimized for performance and rated for pressures of up to 6,000 PSI for oxygen filters and 60,000 PSI for hydraulic and pneumatic filters.

The latest filters need less frequent replacements, which reduces waste. They also help your equipment run in the most energy-efficient way by removing matter smaller than 0.1 microns, as in the case of coalescing filters.

Everything from the housing to the element materials has evolved to enhance the accuracy and durability of filtration methods. Fiber metal felt (FMF) filters are a key development in the aerospace industry since they can handle the dynamic operating environment of aircraft. These filters are rigorously tested to meet the ISO/CD23369 Cyclic Flow Multi-Pass Test.

Biomass and algal materials are being developed as a sustainable, biodegradable alternative. But for now, stainless steel remains the tried-and-tested gold standard for filtration in harsh chemical environments in terms of efficacy.

Find Filters for Your Sustainable Operations

Spanning over 30 years of experience, Chase Filters & Components manufactures filters across many industries, from aerospace to automotive manufacturing. Our filters have been developed using robust testing, so you can depend on them to remove contaminants, maintain equipment performance and minimize their impact on our planet.

We can design and engineer custom industrial and commercial filters to fit your systems, so you can operate efficiently and comply with regulations. Order exactly what you need with our short-run orders to reduce waste and save costs. Call us today at 757-505-7949 or contact us online.