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Chemical Engineering vocabulary · Mass Transfer and Separation Processes

Filtration

Meaning in chemical engineering, with examples

/fɪlˈtreɪʃən/nounCore term

In chemical engineering, filtration means: Separating solid particles from a liquid or a gas by passing the mixture through a porous medium, such as a cloth, mesh or cartridge, that holds the solids back.

In Turkish: filtrasyon, süzme

How it is used

Used across the industry, from catalyst recovery to water treatment. The solids that build up form a filter cake and the clear liquid is the filtrate. Common equipment includes filter presses, Nutsche filters, bag and cartridge filters.

Example sentences

  1. Filtration is slow because the crystals are too fine and blind the cloth.

  2. After filtration, the cake is washed with cold water and sent to the dryer.

Common collocations

  • filtration rate
  • pressure filtration
  • vacuum filtration
  • filter cake
  • filtration step
  • crystallizationForming solid crystals from a solution, usually by cooling it or evaporating the solvent, so that a pure solid product can be separated.
  • dryingRemoving water or another liquid from a solid, usually by heating it with hot gas or under vacuum, until it reaches the required moisture content.
  • unit operationA basic physical step that appears in many different processes, such as distillation, filtration, drying or heat exchange. Any plant can be described as a chain of these steps.
  • pressure dropThe loss of pressure as a fluid flows through a pipe, valve, filter, bed or piece of equipment, caused mainly by friction.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Mass Transfer and Separation Processes

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