Earlier This Year…
Refractron recently delivered an innovative solution when faced with unique challenges.
As discussed in a previous blog post, earlier this year Refractron was tasked with creating a secondary ceramic insert to sit inside the full-size filter elements for a radio-active waste clean-up project stewarded by the Idaho Environmental Coaltion.
The existing insert was an all-metal design that allowed the filter element to be welded to the thin flange and suspended from the top of the filter tube. Despite not being a weldable material, Refractron was able to mate a metal flange with a ceramic filter. Read on to learn more:
Challenging Ourselves to Exceed Our Own Expectations
The task was to supply a ceramic filter insert attached to a thin metal flange to ride on top of the existing filter tubes. Our preliminary design used a basic high-temperature epoxy to mate the flange and tube… but our team knew we could do better than that.
Through a creative collaboration between process, design, and application engineering, Refractron was able to mechanically attach the ceramic tube to a metal flange. Not only that, the tube features three different porosities! Sufficed to say, I was excited to see the finished product and share the design with everyone!
The Design Process
First, our manufacturing team isostatically pressed an oversized tube. They then delicately hand tamped a different porosity powder in the bottom of the tube to create the closed end.
This part was fired, creating cylinder walls with one porosity and a closed end with a second porosity. That’s when Refractron’s skilled machinists took over. They created a small ridge on the top of the ceramic tube that allowed us to slide a custom, threaded metal coupling onto it that screwed into the top flange. A screw was the final mechanism that locked the tube to the metal flange.
We had the luxury to test the impact of a membrane coating, so our ceramists added a fine layer to half the fleet of tubes to see if we could improve filtration without compromising pressure drop.
To avoid surprises in the field we confirmed the integrity of the design in house by heating the fully assembled element to operating temperatures. It passed!
Comprehensive Research & Optimal Quality in Every Part We Producte
When Refractron parts are developed and shipped, you can be assured that we’ve done our utmost to supply high-quality ceramic components that have undergone rigorous design and testing by a team dedicated to excellence.
If you need a resilient porous ceramics tailored to a specific application, Refractron offers complimentary engineering assessments. Tell us what you need made or what you’re trying to achieve! Contact Refractron today to explore possibilities to enhance performance and reliability and lower operating costs.
Contributing Author: Tyler Roberts
Tyler Roberts is a Chemical Engineer at Refractron Technologies. Contact Tyler at (315) 879-0811 or troberts@refractron.com for a free assessment to see if we can help you with parts that will extend maintenance cycles, improve product quality and process reliability and reduce your operational costs.