Solid-liquid separation plays an important role in the pharmaceutical and chemical process industries. Main tasks of this process step are:
- recovering and dewatering the solids from the liquids. Please note that the valuable product may be either the solids or the liquid form.
- Washing the solids from impurities and/or mother liquor
- Avoid cross contamination between the product and the environment/operator
Our equipment is suitable to separate mechanically and/or thermally the solids from the liquid.
In the first step the liquid filters through a packed bed called cake, retained by a filtering media, which can be a multi layer cloth or metallic net/sieves.
In the same piece of equipment we may wash the cake by feeding the washing solution and let it filter through the same cake.
In the second step we remove the residual moisture (always remaining after the mechanical separation) by a suitable combination of heat and vacuum. The result is a dry and free flowing powder. It is worth mentioning that we can achieve also a good mixing results of the solids while drying!
- a filter or a centrifuge are capable of performing the first step, i.e. the mechanical separation
- a dryer’s task is to perform the second step, i.e. the thermal separation
- a filter dryer can do both in the same piece of equipment
- a mixer has to homogenize the solids from quality, density and particle size point of view
