Filter Housing Failure

Filter Housing Failure

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One day in the dead of winter, a customer contacted us with a red alert: A filter bowl had ruptured at their mill, unleashing 150 GPM of hydraulic fluid at 6,000 psi—a pressure high enough to sever an arm or penetrate a body like a cannonball. 

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Thankfully, we don’t see such dramatic, potentially life-threatening events very often. However, filter housings crack and leak high pressure fluids regularly, so our team was prepared to quickly evaluate the situation and pinpoint a solution.

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Manufactures design for service pressure levels related to a given number of pressure cycles to define the service life of a filter housing beyond which fatigue stresses can lead to failure. In the real world of industrial operations equipment, operators don’t keep track of pressure cycles and that usually doesn’t have great penalties until the operating pressures are high.

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Our experts got to work, advising our customer to enter routine replacement notations in their CMMS system at a predictable time when they knew a million-cycle fatigue life would be approaching. They also installed a hydraulic accumulator in the circuit to cushion the water hammer shock created by valve closing downstream of the filter housing. 

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With Bennett Filtration to the rescue, you can be sure your filter housing failures will be solved quickly, efficiently, and safely.