Evaporative water cooling specialist Industrial Water Cooling (IWC) has become the official Southern Africa distributor for Italy-based water filtration systems manufacturer SATI Filters.

An effective water filtration system is crucial to the smooth running of industrial cooling tower operations and ensures optimum efficiency, explains IWC.

Filtration systems prevent corrosion and reduce the risk of growth of the deadly Legionella bacteria and other microbes.

An effective filtration system reduces downtime, owing to scheduled or unscheduled maintenance, and reduces unnecessary loss of water.
IWC says that SATI’s filtration systems cover the entire field of normal filtration from one μm to 5 000 μm. Its product offering includes manual filters, semi-automatic filters, self-cleaning screen filters, pleated cartridges and membrane filters.

Unlike most of the major manufacturers, all SATI filters are constructed with a stainless steel body, which is ideal in an industrial water cooling environment, owing to steel’s higher resistance to wear and tear, its ability to work under harsh operating environments and a longer life span.

The main models, such as the SATI rotor, have been designed to work in aggressive conditions and are available in duplex stainless steel or stainless steel coated with a special paint.

IWC supply a number of SATI filter models to fit industry-specific cooling water filtration requirements.

Self-Cleaning Filters
Aquaspeed is a self-cleaning water filter system with a patented pressurised water jet that cleans the cartridge, ensuring low water consumption and short stops of the outlet flux during the cleaning cycle. It is suitable for use in pressurised systems with a small flow rate (less than 40 m3/h) and is supplied with valves, pressure gauges and an electronic controller. This is the only filter that is able to function and regenerate the filter element at low flow rates (5 m3/h) .

Autojet is similar to the Aquaspeed in that it incorporates a pressurised water jet system. This filter offers filtration from 25 µm to 2 000 µm and is suitable for the treatment of water that has a high concentration of suspended solids, owing to the installation of an internal cartridge containing polyester filtering tissue inserted into a holding net in stainless steel.

Rotor water filters are equipped with suction pads that ensure the complete cleaning of the filter screen with minimum water use and without stopping the water cooling filtration process. They are designed for filtration of liquids with solid particles and colloidal materials. The filtration degree ranges from 25 µm to 810 µm.

Another model of this series, the Rotor Jumbo, has been specifically designed to filter large volumes of water (from 800 m3/h to 3 000 m3/h). The Rotor Jumbo has a filtration degree ranging from 200 μm to 1 500 μm while still maintaining all the key features of the smaller Rotor system.

Big Matic filters contain cartridges that rotate during the cleaning cycle and are regenerated by pressurised nozzles. This type of system is widely used for microfiltration of liquids with impurities that measure between 1 μm and 25 μm, which ensures low consumption of water while cleaning.

This filter’s unique pleated cartridge design means that it has a greater filtering area, compared with normal filtration cartridges. This filter system has been designed with a modular structure, which enables the assembly of multiple modules to cater for any water flow, says the company.

Manual and Semiautomatic
IWC also supplies SATI water filters that require manual cleaning as well as models that have semiautomatic cleaning capabilities. The basket filter is one such manual cleaning system that is easy to access, owing to a lid that incorporates folding closures, allowing quick and easy maintenance with reduced cooling tower downtime. This product can be used as a protective filter for pumps used in water wells, rivers or canals full of large suspended solids.

The Brush filter system is semiautomatic, providing a large filtration range from 25 μm to 2 000 μm and is suitable for the treatment of water wells, rivers, canals and process water containing suspended solids. Cleaning the filter is quick and easy due to its semi-automatic cleaning group.