What Type of Filtration Setup Makes the Most Sense?
The key is air-to-cloth ratio. For thermal cutting operations, that means 1-to-1—1 square foot of filter media for a 1-cubic-foot-per-minute (CFM) application. For more aggressive environments where a shop might be cutting really thick metal and having longer periods of uptime, that ratio is 0.5-to-1. So a shop with a 2,000-CFM application would need 4,000 sq. ft. of media to stay on top of the cutting. You might opt for a 1.5-to-1 or a 2-to-1 ratio to minimize initial investments, but the cartridge filters are going to load much faster as they struggle to keep up with the cutting. As a result, the maintenance person is going to have to replace filters much more frequently, and the shop floor will have to schedule breaks between individual sheet cuts so that the cartridge filters have a chance to shed particulate with controlled pulses.
