The company, Fox Drilling, recently found that while drilling in very heavy dust conditions, it needed to replace or service the filters on its 950cfm compressor at intervals of eight hours or sooner. In extremely poor conditions, the filters would require replacement in as little as four hours. After searching for ways to stretch out the time between filter changes, Fox turned to filtration specialist Donaldson, which supplied a straight-through fluted filter design called PowerCore.Donaldson says this design is up to 10 times more efficient than conventional filters, and that since Fox has fitted the PowerCore filters to its compressors, the first filter change was made at 1000 hours after working in very poor dust conditions west of Townsville.“At 1000 hours we still had not reached maximum restriction on our system so we could have operated for much longer,” said Fox Drilling managing director Derek McDonald.“But we were so happy to have gone from a maximum of 40 hours in good conditions to 1000 hours in fair to poor conditions. This is a great cost saving in filters and servicing time.”Donaldson says its PowerCore filters have twice the amount of filter media as in traditional engine filtration solutions.
