Producing the highest-quality polyester and nylon fibers starts with selecting the right fiber filter media. Our filtration powders are specifically engineered for melt-spun polymers, ensuring exceptional performance.
Typical Melt Spun Polymer Alloys
Our filtration products are suited for a range of melt spun polymers:
- Polyamide / Nylon – AMETEK DP-1 Product Line
- Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) / Polyester – AMETEK 316L or DP-1 Product Line
- Polypropylene – AMETEK 316L or DP-1 Product Line
- Custom hot polymer filtration materials are offered for the most demanding applications
Enhanced Fiber Quality with Metal Powders
Our metal powders offer significant advantages over traditional filtration materials such as metallic fibers, sand, or glass. The highly irregular shapes of our fiber and hot polymer filtration powders deliver exceptionally high surface areas, maximizing the filtration efficiency of polymers.
This technology is extremely effective at shearing polymer micro-gels and trapping foreign materials or impurities within the polymer melt. This ensures maximum cleanliness and quality of the polymer exiting the spin pack.
Key advantages include:
- Outstanding continuity of spin operation
- Premium fiber quality through superior filtration
- Excellent volume performance due to robustness of metal powder
- Precision porosity and tortuosity in filtration media for maximum hot polymer shear enabled by our advanced water atomization technology
- No chemical reaction with polymer, eliminating any discoloration of the fiber
- Spin pack efficiency, quality and polymer filter cleaning (our exceptional quality removes superfine particles that can clog nozzles or break yarn leading to Fiber On Floor / FOF)
- Extreme control over Particle Size Distribution (PSD) control for optimized performance of each spin pack
- Cost effective without compromising on quality
Polymer Temperature Control
Precise polymer temperature control is essential to prevent capillary breakage and inconsistencies in fiber dyeing. Our sintered metal filter powders outperform silica sand, offering four times greater thermal conductivity.
This ensures highly uniform temperature distribution within the spin pack, enabling consistent fiber quality and enhanced process reliability.
Fiber Powder Sizes
Our fiber and hot polymer filtration powders are screened to precise mesh sizes, ensuring optimal spinning quality and throughput. We offer a wide range of sintered metal powder sizes, from coarse cuts to fine cuts, with distributions ranging from wide to very narrow. This allows you to effectively balance fiber quality and cost in your spinning operations.
Typical Sizes Include:
-200/+325M, -40/+100M, -325/+400M, -100/+200M, -25/+50M, -50/+70M, -140/+200M, -70/+100M, -35/+45M, and -30/+50M.
The selected medium or combination of porous media filter elements used in the spin pack depends on the polymer and target product. Powder “cut” or size and grade depend on the type of polymer being spun and target fiber dimensions.
Custom Sizes Available
In addition to our standard offerings, we routinely produce custom mesh sizes and grades to meet specific requirements. Contact us to discuss your needs for tailored powder filter products.
Fiber Powder Applications
Our fiber and hot polymer filtration powders are integral to spin packs that transform bulk polymers into high-performance synthetic fibers. Applications include textiles, carpets, tire cords, airbags, and more.
Process - Converting Polymers to Yarn
- Melt and Extrude: Heat polymer chips until molten and extrude them through the spin pack.
- Filtration: Filter the molten polymer using metallic fiber powders within the spin pack to remove impurities and ensure fiber quality.
- Fiber Accumulation: Collect the extruded fibers onto a bobbin for further processing.
- Stretching, Twisting, and Winding: Manipulate the fibers to achieve the desired strength, structure, and finish.