Spring-time issues with GT Inlet Air Filtration

When your car parked outside the Plant is all yellow from pollen, you can imagine how your filters look like as your gas turbine is sucking in hundreds of cubic meters of the same pollen rich air through the GT Inlet air filters - every second.

Why is pollen so difficult for filters to deal with?

Pollen particle sizes can vary between 10 to 1000 microns, so they are easy to capture with standard filtration. Due to the large particle size of pollen, the loading is distributed almost solely on prefilter and just a little on fine filter stages.

A proper prefilter as 1st stage is capturing most of pollen particles while an F9 fine filter as 2nd stage captures more than 70% of the remaining particles. So it′s not the capturing pollen that is problematic, it is having sufficient pre-filter surface left to manage operation until the summer filter change-out without tripping to high dp.

But without proper E11 HEPA filtration as 3rd stage, your compressor blades are still getting a dust coating and you will need to do some washing to recover the power loss caused by the spring miracle.

Adding to the spring misery there are also the days of high street dust concentration when the streets near by your plant are being cleaned after the long winter, and the air quality analyzers are reading PM10 daily average values several times higher than normal (even higher than 100 ug/m3 of PM10 concentrations).

With the high pollen concentration the only way of coping with the pollen problem is to have a sufficient filtration surface area left in your filters, especially Pre-filters – and hopefully having a spare pre-filter set in stock for a quick change out if your dp alarm is constantly blinking the high dp warning and closing in on your trip levels!

Spring comes every year, it′s just the question of how severe the pollen count will be this year.

If you are experiencing filtration problems this spring, you may want to contact your Friendly Filter Guy - and we will come up with a better filtration solution to your problem!