Preparation and characterization of porous composite filter medium by polytetrafluoroethylene foam coating.

The high costs of ceramic and Teflon filter media for hot gas cleaning has limited their industrial applications. This paper presents a foam coating technology that can be used to produce an inexpensive and highly efficient filter for industrial applications. A new apparatus was designed and built that coats porous glass mats with liquid-phase polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). The machine generates bubbles, enables the formation of uniform micropores less than 45 microm in diameter, and produces a product with air permeability greater than 5.5 cm3/cm2/sec. The resulting filter was found to be thermally stable up to 270 degrees C without any visible distortion and was comparable in dust collection efficiency to other commercial filter media. In addition, its de-dusting efficiency was greater than 85%, which is similar to that of other test filter media.