Filter Builder
Pick a scenario, plug in your real numbers, and see flow, water quality, annual return and payback in years live. Same vessel, five elements, your economics.
The 30-element Purus vessel runs a range of filter elements at a consistent geometry. Pore size sets the flow, the removal target, and the operating philosophy. Coarser elements push more volume; the gel membrane brings the microbial removal and regenerable economics.
All values calculated against the standard Purus vessel configuration. Daily volumes assume 24 h running — adjust below in the builder if you run a different duty cycle.
| Attribute | 20 Micron | 10 Micron | 5 Micron | 3 Micron | Gel Membrane |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pore size | 20 µm | 10 µm | 5 µm | 3 µm | ~10 nm |
| Flux (LMH) | 5,000 | 3,000 | 2,000 | 1,500 | 1,000 |
| Flow (L/min) | 471 | 283 | 189 | 141 | 94 |
| Daily volume (m³, 24 h) | 679 | 408 | 272 | 204 | 136 |
| Turbidity removal | 75% | 85% | 92% | 96% | 99.9%+ |
| Effluent NTU | 2.5–5.0 | 1.5–3.0 | 0.8–1.5 | 0.4–0.8 | <0.05 |
| Long-term recovery | 93–95% | 91–94% | 90–93% | 89–92% | 88–92% |
| Savings/yr vs cartridge | $800–$1,500 | $1,200–$2,200 | $1,800–$3,000 | $2,500–$4,000 | $6,000–$15,000+ |
Plain English. Describe your application, daily volume, water-quality target, and anything specific about your site. The page will interpret what you've written, let you correct the interpretation, then recommend a Purus configuration.
Mention application (brewery / mining / power / wave pool / building / municipal), daily volume (kL/day, m³/day, or ML/day), water-quality target (clarity, drinking-water, virus-grade), and influent turbidity if known.
Pick the filtration approach you’re running (or considering). The panel below shows the technical and economic comparison versus Purus, prefills your current-system baseline costs into the calculator, and highlights where the Purus platform offers a measurable edge. Every default is indicative — override any value below to fit your site.
Each preset loads realistic duty cycle, water value and electricity rate for that industry. You can change any value after — the scenario just gives you a sensible starting point.
Two ways to model the baseline: use Blue Quest’s published cartridge-system benchmark, or enter your actual current-system annual costs for a direct delta. All inputs are live — results update as you type.
The 5-year / 43,800 h element life and the monthly 3-hour CIP cadence are not picked from a vendor brochure — they’re validated longitudinally using flux-recovery ratio (FRR) measurements from extended operating data.
FRR (%) = (Jw / J0) × 100
J0 = initial clean-water flux (pristine element)
Jw = clean-water flux after a filtration cycle + standard CIP
What FRR proves: a high, stable FRR (Purus sustains 88–92% cycle-over-cycle in longitudinal trials) means the fouling that builds up between backwashes is almost entirely reversible cake-layer fouling — cleaned off by the CIP — rather than irreversible pore-blockage fouling that would wedge into the substrate and shorten asset life.
Why this validates the defaults:
FRR data from Blue Quest longitudinal trials; full report available on request.
Add capex to calculate simple payback. Leave at 0 to skip.
Sensible defaults are used unless you change these. Warnings appear if values fall outside typical operating ranges.
How often the rods need a clean depends on what you’re filtering. Set your influent total suspended solids (TSS) below and the four element ratings show their expected service interval and water-per-cycle on the same panel — per rod, transparent assumptions, no marketing rounding. TSS is the standard filtration unit; we display an NTU equivalent for cross-reference. The sintered rods are modelled with standard cake-filtration principles.
Pick a vessel size and a flux. The summary panel below updates live with your selected TSS to show total filtration area, flow rate, and the corresponding backwash interval — so the discovery numbers line up with what you’d actually buy. Available in 5, 10 and 30 element configurations to suit different flow requirements.
Each backwash uses water, energy and (in some duties) chemicals. Longer intervals between backwashes directly reduce the per-cycle cleaning cost across the year.
Backwashes interrupt production unless you run redundant vessels. Fewer cycles per month means fewer interruptions, smaller redundant capacity, or both.
With a known feed-water profile, service intervals become a planned activity rather than a reactive one — easier to staff, easier to budget, easier to defend in a tender response.
The chart makes the flow-vs-removal trade-off explicit at your actual water. Moving from 5 mg/L TSS to a well-pretreated lower-TSS feed can more than double the time between backwashes on a 10 µm element.
Fewer backwash events per day, week and year — compounds into significant labour and consumables savings versus cartridge filtration.
Backwash discharge needs handling or disposal. Fewer cycles means less waste water generated and lower disposal cost.
Finer ratings (3 µm, 5 µm) deliver lower effluent turbidity. Coarser ratings (10 µm, 20 µm) deliver higher flow and longer service intervals. The decision is yours.
Backwash-regenerable operation, with good cleaning practice, supports a multi-year element life on the same physical rod — not a consumable.
The service-interval model above uses standard cake-filtration principles and the following conservative, clearly stated assumptions:
What this doesn’t capture: actual real-world performance depends on particle-size distribution, water chemistry (organics, scaling tendency, biological load), operating flux variability, backwash effectiveness, and any upstream pre-treatment. The figures above are an honest first-cut model for sizing conversations — not a performance guarantee.
For accurate site-specific predictions we recommend a pilot trial, or send us your water analysis (TSS vs NTU correlation, particle-size distribution, target effluent quality) and we’ll refine the model to your actual feed.
When the sintered rods are operated as the support structure for a hydrate-gel filtration layer (~10 nm separation), the design point and the service intervals are different to bare-rod operation. The numbers below are for gel-coated operation at the recommended design point — not directly comparable to the bare-rod backwash intervals above.
Hydrate gel (~10 nm separation) is the active filtration layer; the sintered rod is its mechanical support. The 3 µm pore substrate optimises cake-filtration mechanics by creating a low-void mechanical boundary layer that tightly anchors the gel layer to the rod surface. With the gel firmly anchored, internal pore-fouling is eliminated and the migration / bleed-through of gel fines into the filtrate — the failure mode seen on coarser 10 µm and 20 µm substrates — does not occur.
Coarser rod ratings (10 µm and 20 µm) deliver marginally longer raw service intervals because they hold a deeper cake before terminal ΔP, but the larger pore void volume lets the gel migrate into the substrate and downstream into the filtrate. The result is greater gel makeup demand, less consistent effluent quality, and gradual loss of the gel layer’s separation performance. For all hydrate-gel duties the 3 µm rod is the right trade-off — the small interval-time penalty is more than offset by lower gel makeup, cleaner filtrate, and predictable cycle behaviour cycle-over-cycle.
| TSS Load | Approx. NTU | 3 µm Rods (Recommended for Gel) |
10 µm Rods | 20 µm Rods | Performance Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 mg/L | ~5 NTU | 5.5 days | 6.3 days | 9.4 days | Excellent |
| 10 mg/L | ~10 NTU | 2.7 days | 3.1 days | 4.7 days | Good |
| 15 mg/L | ~15 NTU | 1.8 days | 2.0 days | 3.0 days | Moderate |
| 20 mg/L | ~20 NTU | 1.4 days | 1.6 days | 2.4 days | Acceptable |
| 30 mg/L | ~30 NTU | 0.9 days | 1.0 day | 1.5 days | Frequent Backwash |
The table above is the published modelling baseline. Real-world performance depends on gel makeup chemistry, particle-size distribution, target effluent and pre-treatment upstream. For a site-specific projection, send us your feed-water analysis or request a pilot trial on the hydrate-gel configuration.
Three views: where the annual cost sits, how long the capex takes to repay, and which single variable moves the net annual return the most.
The Monte Carlo runs 200 trials against your vessel, pump and install cost. Without a capex value, every year shows 100% — not useful.
Why this option: —
This builder gives an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a quote. Performance, savings and payback are subject to site-specific verification — feedwater chemistry, flow profile, footprint, and local regulatory requirements all shift the numbers. Use it to size the opportunity, then talk to engineering for a tailored model.
A chat-style assistant grounded entirely in Blue Quest’s published technical data — element specifications, recovery and flux parameters, the Transparent on the Maths panel, and the industries page. Answers update with your current Filter Builder selections; for anything site-specific, every reply offers a direct line to engineering.
These are the technical anchors the builder runs on. Flow and capacity figures are derived from Blue Quest’s engineering parameters and operating data. Where a value is editable above, this panel notes the default and the typical range.
Flow, capacity and savings values are derived from Blue Quest engineering parameters and operating data. Detailed engineering specifications are proprietary and not published.
Daily m³ = flow (m³/h) × hours × duty cycle × number of vessels. Coarser filters typically run 100% duty; gel defaults to 80% to allow backwash. Override in the configure panel.
Effluent NTU = influent NTU × (1 − removal%). The gel membrane figure (99.9%) is grounded in Blue Quest trial data showing ~99.999% bacteria and particulate removal, published conservatively. The four micron filters’ percentages are indicative starting points subject to site-specific verification.
Annual loss = per-cycle backwash volume × cycles/day × 365. Cycles/day default 12, editable 1–48. Per-filter backwash volumes are indicative; real cadence varies with fouling.
Each Purus vessel runs on a dedicated pump set, default 2.2 kW (editable). Multi-vessel installations scale pumping proportionally; vessels backwash sequentially to maintain uptime.
20–3 µm savings benchmarked against an equivalent high-flow 6″ pleated polypropylene cartridge system (3M / Pall / Pentair / Parker class): ~$200–$400 per cartridge depending on micron rating, replaced every 2–4 months in industrial service, plus labour (~$60–$80 per change-out), housing wear and disposal. Figures from vendor and trade-supply pricing data.
Gel savings benchmarked against the full multi-barrier safe-water train required to match virus-grade output: sediment pre-cartridges + UF hollow-fibre module (~$1,000+ per 4″×40″ unit) + UV lamp + cleaning chemicals + integrity testing. Ceiling reflects upper-end multi-stage RO/UV combinations.
When you switch to My actual costs, the savings line above becomes a direct delta: sum of your annual cartridge, labour, energy, disposal and downtime spend, minus Purus’ annual energy and replacement spend. Payback uses this delta when capex is supplied.
The sensitivity sliders flex water value, electricity rate, duty cycle and influent turbidity around the base case. Min/Max combine all current slider positions. The Biggest profit levers panel ranks each variable by its absolute ±10% impact on net annual return and tags each as Big, Medium or Small relative to the largest in your model. The probability-of-payback chart runs a 200-trial Monte Carlo simulation flexing water value ±10%, electricity ±8%, labour ±15%, savings ±15% (benchmark mode), and element-replacement timing ±20% as lumpy events — the y-axis shows the percentage of trials in profit at each year.