Clarisea
The advent of automatic fleece filter, such as the clarisea, brings about a much improved method of mechanical filtration. Gone are the days of floss replacement every couple of days. Not to mention the roller feature regularly remove trapped detritus out of water, preventing decomposition. The fleece claim to handle a flow rate of up to 5000 lph, and filtering particles down to 20 microns.
If you remember the chemistry experiment during your teenage years, you would probably recall the horribly slow process of filtration. Once the solid particles start to build up on the filter paper, the flow rate of liquid grinds to a stop. A typical school lab filter paper has a micron range of 30-50 microns. So how does the clarisea filters smaller particles, and faster? I think there are a few engineering trick involved.
Large Active Filtration Area
The design of the filter roll allows a large surface area of fleece to participate in the filtering process. And logic will tell us, the more fleece we use, the more water can pass through. In the normal operation, the water level will sit just below the float switch activation point, regardless how the clarisea is positioned. This ensures sufficient fleece material participates in the filtering process.
Large Head Pressue
The pressure different on both side of the fleece is the driving force to push the liquid through.
When the clarisea is set up correctly, the liquid level difference is significant. This produce a large driving force to push liquid across the fleece material. Think of this like the booster pump for your RO unit, the increase of the flow rate is critical for the roll filter to operate effectively.
The Fleece
The heart of the filter is the fleece, in here plenty of engineering goes into making it work, well (which is really a basic requirement in filtering media industry). Let's have a look at the fleece material
This is a piece of (kind of) clean fleece under the microscope. Clearly we can see a hole punched out in the material. In fact, if you were to look at the roll filter carefully, you can spot all these hole easily even with just the naked eye. So, here is the question. How does this fleece carries out filtration? Is it like a colander where water flows through the hole and the solids strained on it? In another words, are these holes small enough to trap the detritus in our aquarium?
Well, these holes are approximately 1mm in diameter. That's 100x the size of most phytoplankton, 20x the size of a rotifer. It's too big to "clarify water". The actual filtering is not done by the hole, but by the fabrics around it.
Looking at this picture of used (and awfully smelly) piece of fleecs shows clearly that there in no solid material trapped by the hole. Rather, many cells, and unidentified mass are collected on the web-like polymer. This is where thr number of 20 microns come from. If you look back at the picture of the clean fleece, you can see the unpolluted network of fibers. This is how Clarisea traps detritus for you.
Why then will they punch holes on the fleece? Wouldn't this allow water to flow through without being filtered? I believe this is an engineering compromise. If there is no provision for these holes, the flow rate through the fleece material will be too low to be of any practical use. These holes acts as a built-in bypass, to allow the clarisea to handle large flow reasonably well.
This is my take on clarisea fleece, and me appreciating how they kind of make this work.
*on a separate note, they should really include an "end of roll indicator" just like those receipt machines. So that we don't have to guess how much material is left on the roll.