Pleating refers to the practice of folding a material into homogenous parallel strips – known as pleats. Pleats are widely used in filtration applications because pleating of the filter media results in an increase of filtration surface area for a given filter volume. A well-designed pleated filter medium achieves a lower pressure drop for any given flow rate.

Pleated media are indispensable for the removal of suspended solids during air/gas and liquid filtration for a multiplicity of industrial applications, such as aerospace, pharmaceutical processing, hospitals, health care, nuclear fuels, nuclear power, and electronic micro-circuitry (computer chips).

The design of a pleated filter for a particular application needs to address crucial parameters such as flow rate (usually in cubic meters or feet per second), filter efficiency (percentage of reduction of micron particles), and filter life span.

These filter specifications depend to a great extent on the type of filtering media (paper, polypropylene - PP, polyethylene - PE, polyester - PET, fiberglass, nonwoven textile, etc.). When the filter media material cannot be pleated or easily collapses when subjected to high pressures, it is possible to laminate one or both sides of the media with wire to prevent pleat collapse under high pressures and maintain consistent flow.

Cylindrical pleated filter elements are widely used because they provide a lot of filter area in limited space, with the well-known benefits of low pressure drop and high filter capacity. As one cannot simply predict the behavior of a pleated filter from experiments on flat sheet media, GeoDict additionally provides the option to model cylindrical pleated filter elements. These models permit the design of filters that use such cylindrical filter elements based on the simulation of the pressure drop, filter efficiency and filter lifetime. Compared to the methodologies of Computer-Aided-Design (CAD), our 3d image-based approach works completely automatic and requires no manual meshing steps before the simulations can run.