One of the world’s largest producers of Oriented Strand Board (OSB), lumber, pulp, containerboard, paper and a variety of other forest products, prides itself on providing clean plant air and as safe a work environment as they can for their employees. The maintenance manager says one of the keys to this is meticulous in-plant dust collection. He uses four dust collectors containing 2,600 filter bags for this important job.

Before being introduced to Donaldson® Torit® Dura-Life™ filter bags, this OSB maker used conventional 16-oz polyester bags that had “bridging” problems. Bridging is when the gaps between the filters fill up with dust—bridging from one filter to another—thereby blocking off airflow pathways and raising the pressure drop to unacceptable levels. In this case, pressure drop reached almost 6-inches water gauge after only 3,000 hours of operation using their original 16-oz conventional polyester bags, forcing them to change filters 2-3 times a year. With their huge fleet of filter bags, this meant excessive manpower and replacement costs.

Now, one year after installing Dura-Life™ filter bags, this OSB factory reports filter life almost 3X as long (8,500 hours), and a stabilized pressure drop 4-inches less than the old filters! While the maintenance manager is very impressed with Dura-Life, he would prefer to keep his excitement under wraps. He laughs, “I don’t want our competitors to have Dura-Life!”

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