G'day,

I am working on a project where we are trying to reinstate a filter unit on a bulk bag charge hopper. The original charge hopper is an American Process Systems unit, however they do not have a presence in Australia and so cannot help. This is a tiny project and so local dust collector manufacturers/suppliers are not giving us high priority.

The system currently sees around 20% of the lighter products ending up being sucked into the current dust collector which then has to be brought back for re-processing, so something has to be done.

Seeing as we are getting prices as high as for a new large dust collector for just 4 or 5 filter elements around 600 mm long and the associated items like venturis and blowbacks that we then have to have someone else fabricate and install the unit, the company wants to do something itself. The problem is that we are now having difficulty finding some dimensional information on the componentry - in particular, a standard venturi. Is such information available? If not we are faced with ordering a replacement venturi, and going over it with measuring equipment. For the rest of the equipment, we will simply have to see what is there on the existing dust collector and adjust the volume of the pulse because of the much smaller filter bags.

This may not be considered the ideal way to tackle the problem, but we have little choice. At the moment, plant operators have installed a single stainless steel tube with some slits cut into it over which they place a filter sock. There are no blowbacks so the filter clogs quickly and has little effect after that. So, anything has to be better than what we have.

The existing dust collector the dust ends up in has roughly 110 mm diameter cages over which the filter socks go and to get something like the original surface area, we are looking at 4 to 5 elements.

Any pointers?

Thanks ■