Air to Cloth Ratio

Do you know if your dust collection system is performing efficiently? Today we're going to talk about air to cloth ratio and how that affects the performance of your dust collection system.

 

Air to cloth ratio in your dust collection system is a critical measurement to keep your system running at peak efficiency. Air to cloth ratio simply put is the amount of air passing through one square foot of filter media. The lower your air to cloth ratio, ,the more effective your system is going to run and the cleaner air you can produce out of your system. Making sure you have the right air to cloth ratio in your system will help extend filter life, keep

 

Operating at a higher air to cloth ratio you're going to run into some issues. You're going to notice things like a loss of suction. A lot of dust laden air is trying to run through a smaller amount of filter media. This can clog up your filters quicker, meaning less filter life and you're gonna have to do more changeouts. Increasing the cost of maintenance on your system

 

In order to calculate your air to cloth ratio you're going to need to gather a few things. First you're going to need to know how many filters are in your system. Second you're going to need to understand how much filter media is in each filter. You're also going to need to understand how much CFM your fan is moving through your system.

 

Here's an example. A 16 cartridge dust collector pulling 7000 CFM. First take the 16 cartridges and multiply that by 120 square feet per filter. This gives you 1920 square feet. Divide the CFM, 7000 in this case, by the 1920 square feet giving you a ratio of 3.65 to 1. Air to cloth ratios can vary depending on your dust type.