Around half of everything we mould at BEC is filter related. That proportion has grown steadily since 1982, when we produced our first tumble dryer filters for Philips.

Today, we design, tool and manufacture bespoke filters for clients in automotive, marine, transport, biomedical and beverage industries worldwide, producing thousands every week from our factory.

A good number of those projects started with a customer using a catalogue filter that wasn’t performing well enough.

Read on as we break down the limits of off-the-shelf and understand when you’ll benefit greatly from a custom filter solution.

Where Off-the-Shelf Filters Fall Short

Standard catalogue filters are designed to cover the widest possible range of applications.

That makes them readily available and competitively priced, but it also imposes natural limitations on their functionality.

Mostly, they’re sized for common housings, rated for general flow and pressure ranges and manufactured from materials chosen for broad compatibility rather than optimal performance in any one setting.

In demanding applications, those compromises can illuminate themselves:

  • Flow rates that don’t match the system requirement
  • Media grades that capture the wrong particle size
  • Filter housing dimensions that don’t fit the available space
  • Materials that degrade in contact with specific chemicals
  • Replacement cycles driven by the filter’s limitations

These issues compound and manifest in the kind of reliability-centric applications that leave little room for compromise.

When Custom Manufacturing Makes Sense

Custom filter manufacturing is worth considering whenever the application has specific requirements that you’d be hard-pressed to meet with off-the-shelf products. That includes:

  • Unusual housing dimensions or mounting configurations
  • Specific flow, pressure, and particle-retention requirements
  • Operating environments with temperature extremes, chemical exposure or vibration
  • High-volume applications where a marginal improvement in filter performance compounds across thousands of units
  • Projects where the filter is integral to the product design rather than a replaceable consumable

A bespoke filter designed around the application will outperform a standard one adapted to fit it.

Over the lifetime of the product, the total cost of ownership, including reduced maintenance, longer service intervals and better system performance, frequently makes custom the more cost-effective route.

What the Development Process Looks Like With BEC

We’ve been developing custom filter mouldings for over four decades and the process has been refined throughout. Here’s how a typical project runs.

Understanding the Application

Most of the important decisions happen here. What’s being filtered? Air, oil, water, fuel or debris? What particle size needs capturing?

What are the flow and pressure requirements? What temperature and chemical environment will the filter operate in? The answers affect everything that follows.

Design and Material Selection

With the application understood, our engineering team advises on the filter geometry, selects the mesh or media type and specifies the plastic.

Nylon, polypropylene and ABS are the most common choices, though the right material depends on the operating conditions.

Tooling and Prototyping

The mould tool is designed and cut in-house, giving us full control over quality and timeline.

For projects where the design needs to be validated before production tooling is committed, our rapid prototyping service can produce sample parts quickly, allowing the concept to be tested in the real operating environment.

Production

With the tool approved and the design signed off, production runs on our horizontal and vertical moulding machines.

The verticals are specifically configured for filter encapsulation – mesh or media is inserted into the mould before the plastic is injected around it. Runs can be as small or as large as the project requires.

Talk to BEC About Your Filtration Needs

If you’re working with an off-the-shelf filter that isn’t performing the way you need it to, or you’re developing a new product that requires a bespoke filtration solution, get in touch. We’ll review the application and tell you whether a custom filter makes sense and if it does, what the development process, timeline and cost would look like.