Bondex is proud to introduce Hydrolox® and Hydrolox® HCE, a new technology to the industrial dust collection market, produced from a unique process technology which delivers superior filtration performance versus incumbent materials. Historically, various fiber types are formed into various weights of filtration media through a traditional needle loom which has met market needs with a specific balance of properties. However, today’s utilities and industrial users are demanding higher performance filtration; filters which deliver improved collection efficiency with lower operating costs in a robust filtration system.

Hydrolox® family of filter media, available only from Bondex, combines the benefits of needle loom fiber entangling with revolutionary hydro-entangling technology to deliver industry leading dust collection performance. The phenomena of entangling fibers with high pressure water jets creates a unique balance of lower mean pore size in a mass-efficient structure. Hydrolox® represents a new paradigm in filtration media by delivering a product with dramatically improved filtration efficiency, an inherent ability to promote surface dust collection, lower pressure drop over time, and reduction in pulse cycle times.

Typically, a choice must be made between filtration efficiency and air permeability. Ideally, plants could be operated with a fabric filter baghouse with maximum airflow and maximum efficiency. However, the filtration industry is forced to choose from two primary fabric technologies: Needlefelt and ePTFE membrane laminated to either woven glass or needlefelt.   Recently, Bondex has introduced Hydrolox® and Hydrolox® HCE as new alternatives to traditional filter fabrics which provide users and OEMs a solution that is closer to the theoretical optimum between efficiency and air permeability, with a fabric technology that favors surface dust collection.

Needlefelt fabric technology provides users with a relatively breathable fabric which offers adequate filtration efficiency for several applications. There also exists an incremental improvement on the needlefelt platform where fabric producers add a micro-fiber “cap” to the needlefelt to offer marginal improvement in filtration efficiency without sacrificing breathability. Alternatively, applications which require superior filtration efficiency are forced to only one other option: ePTFE membrane laminated to either woven glass or needlefelt. This membrane laminated fabric offers high efficiency, but at the cost of low breathability and high pressure drop.

The graphic on the left below illustrates this technology landscape. The upper-right corner of this graph illustrates the “theoretical optimum” which is a filtration fabric of 100% efficiency at maximum breathability.

Bondex sought to improve how filter fabrics were produced, and successfully developed the Hydrolox® technology. Hydrolox® combines the benefits of needle loom entanglement with revolutionary hydro-entangling technology which produces filtration fabric with a fundamentally new balance of properties. While there may be other hydro-entangled (or “spunlace”) fabrics in the market, only the Hydrolox® product provides options in polyester, PPS and aramid up to 18 oz/yd2 from a process which was specifically designed to bring solutions to the industrial filtration market. The graphic on the right above illustrates how Hydrolox® delivers improved filtration efficiency versus needlefelt without sacrificing air permeability. Additionally, Hydrolox® HCE delivers improved air permeability over a membrane laminated media with equal filtration efficiency. Even for applications which require maximum filtration efficiency with low air permeability, Hydrolox® with ePTFE membrane is available as well.