Making your waste incinerator safe

Most high temperature waste disposal applications are there for a reason: because the waste being disposed of is harmful or dangerous, or potentially could be harmful or dangerous, in some way. Obvious examples include medical waste and any potential biological waste, including animals from farms where outbreaks of controlled diseases have been reported, all human corpses and furnishings and equipment from hospitals or the homes where infirm and ailing people have passed on. Waste of this nature, either definitively dangerous for further human contact or in a bracket where it may have been contaminated in some way, and so be considered possibly dangerous for further human contact, is disposed of in a waste incinerator, where extremely high temperature flame jets reduce the lot to ashes.

Naturally, when this process takes place a percentage of whatever contaminants or dangerous materials were present in the waste end up in the smoke, hot gases or other exhaust matter that is vented from the burned article, body or object. The exhaust stream, which is referred to in the industry as a “hot gas stream”, is basically composed of a mixture of dangerous and non dangerous particles, which are harmful to human health. The mixture needs to be cleaned before the exhaust stream itself is safe to vent into the atmosphere.

A waste incinerator, then, needs to have some pretty effective equipment attached to it if it is to perform its designated duties with complete safety – both for its operators, and for anyone who may later come into contact with the cleaned gases that have been vented from the incinerator. As such, incinerator hot gas filtration – the equipment used for the process and the design of that equipment is of the utmost importance. Get the filtration wrong and you either face being shut down or worse contaminating an area and then being shut down.

Hot gas streams are traditionally difficult to filter. When your waste incinerator lets off the smoke, particulate waste and hot gas from the object or body it has burned, all the exhaust streams are too hot for a normal bag filter or normally arranged filter materials to cope with. The gas itself would burn straight through the filter and vent into the open air unchanged. An incinerator, then, requires a more advanced form of filtration – one that is able to remove 100% particulate contaminants even at extreme temperatures, and one that is also capable of cleaning down to sub-micron level particle sizes to ensure that nothing lethal gets through.

The best way to filter the hot gas streams from a waste incinerator is to install proper ceramic disc filters. A ceramic filter can work well at temperatures of over four hundred degrees centigrade, and is completely able to sift even sub-micron particles out of the exhaust flow. When used in conjunction with a well treated bag filter (often a wet bag filter, which will capture any remaining contaminants by spraying the cooling gas stream with a fine liquid mist and thus forming sludge out of residual particulate matter), the ceramic filtration units in a waste incinerator are among the most preffered in the world. Their long lives and extraordinary efficiency are able to render even the most unstable gas stream harmless.