The world can change a lot in fifty years. Fifty years ago, there was no Zimbabwe, Hershey still sold chocolate bars for a nickel, and the Beatles were new on the scene. Filtration technology has also been touched by the hand of time, improving with each new innovation brought about by a new application, driven by tightening standards and commercial demand. Today’s industrial and scientific filters are capable of durability, specificity, and affordability that were only dreamt of 50 years ago. During the first half of the twentieth century, the filtration industry relied on natural materials such as wool, cotton, and wood fiber, which were usually supported by metallic screens, to make filters for a wide variety of applications. But as the century wore on, the industrial processes that relied on filtration to either extract suspended solids or clarify a fluid began to demand ever increasing performance from the filters they used. Luckily, the filtration industry was able to take advantage of new polymeric materials that were being introduced at that time such as polyethersulfone (PES), as well as inorganic materials like ceramics to meet the challenges of increasing filter efficiency. The new media could offer better flow rates, better selectivity, better strength or a combination of those traits. New techniques such as cross-flow filtration also emerged to help deal with the problem of fouling. Taken together, new filtration techniques and new filtration media developed in the later half of the twentieth century allowed for the proliferation of new processes, such as reverse osmosis, that fed back into the demand for new and better filters. The last half-century of the filtration industry has also been accompanied by Filtration+Separation magazine which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Their series of special articles that highlight the high points of the last 50 years of filtration formed the basis of this article. The first and second parts of what will be a three-part series of articles can be found on their website.
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50 Years of Filtration Technology History
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