Industry sector: automotive
Company activity: manufacture of mechanical bearings for the automotive industry
Company type: major global group
Company founding period: 1910s
Contact: methods and maintenance manager
Company context
The company operates around thirty air handling units (AHUs). These are used both to purify the air in offices and the cafeteria, and to treat the air in the workshops, which is polluted by oil vapors. These systems use air-handling unit filters.
Filtration challenge
The company had until then been working with several suppliers for the same family of air filters or equipment. It wanted to streamline its supply chain and reduce costs by selecting only one or two suppliers per filter category.
In filtration, it is common to begin with an initial trial replacement phase (to demonstrate effectiveness) before implementing broader filtration-system changes across an entire production line or for all filtering elements in a plant.
We therefore began by making a proposal to replace the filters installed on two air extraction units, with the goal of achieving cost savings on these regularly replaced filters.
In addition, the filter system we proposed needed to take into account the requirement to handle a relatively high oil load in the air.
The proposed solution had to comply with the technical specifications of the existing air filter, the operating conditions, and the mounting configuration, namely:
- filter with an extraction flow rate of 12,000 m³/h
- 6 bag filters (8-pocket) with dimensions 490 × 592 × 535 mm, M5 efficiency (M5 filter)
- filter frame: galvanized steel
Pemflow filtration solution
We addressed the request concerning the first air handling unit by recommending the following bag filter:
- filter media: polypropylene
- metal bar with central hole for rod mounting
After checking the aerodynamic conditions, we adjusted the filter efficiency to an M6 level (M6 filter).
This solution proved fully satisfactory in terms of filter durability, given the oil load in the air to be treated. The company maintained a change-out frequency similar to that of the previous installation but achieved over 50% savings in operating costs, thanks to a significant reduction in the unit cost of the bag filters.
The customer was also satisfied to have identified a local, responsive contact to whom they could entrust their continuous improvement projects across all their filtration systems.
Other specific filtration projects are currently under review:
- replacement of G4 panel filters on the air handling units with washable polypropylene filters
- supply of filter socks for a Fundabac-type filtration system used to treat cutting oils from the site’s various grinding and finishing workshops
Since the size of the bag filters used was not part of our supplier’s standard catalog, the customer provided us with drawings so that we could manufacture new, custom-sized ones.
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