Now this takes us to gauze filters, with K&N being the leader. And to boot, a tortuous path also impedes flow because there is a pressure drop at every turn in the flow paty. But regardless of that, the capability is there to pass larger dirt particles thru the media and pass thru it does. Now, the argument is that the sticky oil and the tortuous path remove the dirt. That means bigger dirt particles can pass thru and that means more dirt into your engine. So, that means that since the area is smaller, to flow the same amount of air, the pores or mesh size must be bigger. The air must first pass thru the outside surface of the filter. The area I'm talking about here is surface area, not the volumetric capacity created by the thickness of the foam. But their area is still much smaller than that of a pleated paper filter. They filter by providing a tortuous path for the dirt thru the foam with oil added to make the filter sticky and hold the dirt. Hence, lots of area and a long service life for a small mesh size filter. If you open up a paper filter element and remove the paper and stretch out that big accordian, it will turn out to be quite long. It's like the folds in your brain in that is allows much more surface area to be put into a smaller package size. Trouble is, where to you mount that big sheet? So designers come up with all kinds of nifty shapes and styles that get a big area into a small package and that is why paper filter elements are pleated. Afterall, you could just put up a big flat sheet of filter media and it would work just fine. That ends up with a media of a certain mesh or pore size and a certain area.īut there are often space limitations so you sometimes need to figure out how to get as much area to meet your flow requirements into a small envelope. So you pick a media that gives you the dirt filtering performance you want and the correct air flow over a estimated life for the filter. You then oversize it a bit because as it traps dirt, it will begin to plug off some of the ports and hence reduce the flow thru the filter.
So when you design an air filter, you need to know the max flow thru the filter. The smaller the pores the smaller the dirt particles kept out. If you use the same filter media and increase or decrease the total area, your flow will change in direct proportion to the change in area.Ī filter's purpose is to let air thru and keep dirt out. The flow thru a filter is dependent on the size of the pores in the media also referred to as mesh, the number of those pores in a given area and the total area of the filter. Let me give you a long answer to a short question so you know why I say foam filters suck.
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