Baghouse Maintenance – My Baghouse Works Great…Until It Don’t

Is a dust collecting, baghouse system an integral part of your emission control scheme?  Are unannounced filter bag failures fouling up your works? Are you a diligent performance minder or caught in a culture that deals with problems only when problems present themselves?  Is your baghouse maintenance plan full of holes and causing your facility many hours of un-planned downtime?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, then this article is for you.  If you answered no and are satisfied with your baghouse system upkeep, then please read on and let us know if we are on target or not with our viewpoint. Either way, we can all benefit from a little refresher on the tools and support systems available to help make baghouse maintenance better.

Baghouse performance record keeping is the foundation of a good dust control preventative maintenance program. Data gathered from baghouse control systems, source operations and cleaning cycle records will help define how performance issues will present themselves in the future.  Aggregating these data sources into a concise, easy to understand format is the first step towards a good preventative maintenance program.

At a minimum you should be tracking changes in baghouse operations including pressure drop and grain loading. This data should be readily available through the baghouse control system or the plant DCS. This basic data should suffice but you can further refine your baseline performance data by investing in a baghouse leak detection system (BLDS). Although not a mandatory addition, a reliable broken bag detection system can take you deeper into the performance weeds offering some of the finer details needed to better understand your site-specific application.

On the unit operations side you will want to record changes to production processes identifying actions that add load to the dust removal system.  Source level production logs, output charts, fuel data and operating load can all provide insight on how your baghouse will function.  Even downstream data from stack analyzers like Opacity or particulate matter (PM) can be added to improve analysis models. Lastly, keep track of cleaning cycles, bag breakage and filter changeouts to round out the data collection baseline.  This will give you everything you need to move forward. Aggregating data from different sources can be a challenge but investing in this effort up front will pay dividends down the road. If all else fails, there are software solution providers out there that specialize in baghouse monitoring/data collection/aggregation solutions that can ease the pain if manually organizing data from multiple sources becomes too much.

With the baseline data in hand, you can move on to develop a formal Preventative Maintenance Plan. You should look to create an easy to follow, well-documented lists of tasks supported by checklists, logbooks or a software tracking system.  Maintenance documentation can be as simple as a pen/paper/clipboard or more sophisticated using a software system that has a logbook function. You don’t have to invest a lot of money to make an effective program but you do need to invest your time to develop a good one. Keeping it simple is fine provided you maintain a disciplined approach with clear accountability expectations for the participants. The best plans get the maintenance team into a regular routine arranged as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual inspections with recommended corrective actions. Document storage and record retrieval should be accessible and periodically reviewed with the support staff.  Open communication and regular feedback help keep people focused on the importance of the tasks at hand and provides valuable insight to process improvements.

Once the program gets rolling you can further enhance the maintenance process by integrating testing and inspections of secondary and tertiary parts of the system into the regular routine.  This would include the mechanical aspects of the baghouse such as system inlet design, material storage hoppers/feed systems, filter media types, pleated filters vs non pleated, pulse jets configuration and even the air compressor system used to support the baghouse. All these additional components can be factors that impact performance and ultimately filter bag life.  By adopting a mindset of continuous improvement, you will optimize performance, minimize unit downtime and reduce costs. 

Thank you for your kind attention and allowing us the opportunity to present this topic to you from a very generic, high level view of baghouse maintenance.  If you are truly interested in some detailed assistance, then check out the folks at BWF Envirotec.  These guys are experts that can speak very knowledgably about long term health and support of your baghouse systems. Questions, clarifications or corrections for REGS – just give us a shout.