Filter technology guards against mussel infestation

Paul Boughton

In order to use water from the River Main as cooling water in an industrial park at Frankfurt, Germany, a pharmaceutical producer had to clean his mussel-infested plate heat exchangers in the end every two months during summer time.

The search for a suitable filter system for the protection of the heat exchangers was anything but simple, because river water as a cooling medium poses specific requirements to the filters.

A solution was be found in the form of a Filterautomat of Dango & Dienenthal Filtertechnik GmbH, including the MUSSEL STOP System.

This is an automatic backwash filter, which is successfully used for many years in the fight against mussel larvae. The effectiveness is a result of an optimised relation of flow rate and filter size as well as a special filter element design.

A certain combination of these different factors allows for a reliable kill of mussel larvae, massively reduces the biofouling danger in pipe systems and therefore significantly extends maintenance intervals of machines like heat exchangers, spray nozzles, etc.

Moreover, the filter fineness of <300µm offers reliable protection against bigger mussels and coarse contaminations. The filter itself is cleaned automatically at a pre-defined differential pressure or time period without any personnel deployment is required. This all leads to enormous savings compared to the time period prior to installation of the Filterautomat.

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