Filter Housings

A filter housing is a pressure vessel that contains replaceable filter cartridges or membrane elements while feed water, gas, or process fluid passes through under pressure. The housing has three jobs: safely contain the operating pressure, distribute flow evenly across every contained element, and maintain a leak-free seal at the cartridge or membrane interface so unfiltered fluid cannot bypass the media. In a typical industrial filtration system, the housing is the long-life capital component — often 10 to 20 years of service — while the cartridges or membranes inside are consumables that get replaced as they capture contaminants. Without the right housing, even the best cartridge cannot deliver its rated performance.

Industrial filter housings are categorized by what they contain and by their material of construction. By contained element: cartridge filter housings hold replaceable depth or pleated cartridges for particle and microbe removal; bag filter housings hold filter bags for high-volume coarse filtration; and membrane housings hold spiral-wound RO, NF, or UF membrane elements for desalination, water reuse, and ultrapure water production. By material: stainless steel housings handle clean to moderately corrosive feeds, hot water, and sanitary duty; FRP (fiber-reinforced plastic) composite housings handle seawater, high-chloride brackish water, and chemically aggressive feeds where metal would corrode; carbon steel and polymer housings cover lower-pressure or budget-driven applications. Pullner manufactures stainless steel cartridge housings and FRP membrane housings — the two highest-volume types in industrial filtration.

The four most common construction materials in industrial filter housings are 304 stainless steel (the lowest-cost stainless grade, used for clean water and food applications under approximately 200 ppm chloride), 316L stainless steel (the workhorse for moderately corrosive feeds, sanitary food and pharma applications, hot water, and steam-cleaning duty up to roughly 1,000 ppm chloride), FRP composite (filament-wound glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy or vinyl-ester resin, used for seawater, brackish water, high-pressure RO membrane vessels, and any feed where stainless would pit), and engineering polymers such as reinforced polypropylene or PVC for low-pressure or budget-driven applications. The material choice is driven by feed-water chloride content, operating temperature, sanitary requirements, and pressure rating. Pullner manufactures both stainless steel and FRP housings — the two materials covering the majority of industrial filtration duty.

The two serve fundamentally different roles in a filtration train. Stainless steel cartridge housings contain replaceable cartridges — string wound, pleated, melt blown, membrane, and others — that remove particles and microbes from a process stream. Typical applications include process water, food and beverage clarification, and condensate polishing. FRP membrane housings contain spiral-wound RO, NF, or UF membrane elements that perform desalination, water reuse, and ultrapure water production at high pressure. FRP is specified for membrane service because the seawater chloride levels and pressure regimes typical of seawater RO would corrode or pit metal housings over a 10-year service life. In a complete system you typically have stainless cartridge housings upstream as final 5 µm pre-filters protecting the membranes, and FRP housings containing the actual RO/NF/UF membranes downstream.

Sizing a filter housing starts with five inputs: flow rate in GPM or m³/h (determines how many cartridges the housing must hold and what diameter), operating pressure and temperature (sets the housing material and pressure class), feed-water chemistry (chloride content and pH determine whether stainless or FRP is required), target effluent quality (sets the cartridge micron rating, which then dictates housing-cartridge compatibility), and footprint or installation constraints (determines single-cartridge versus multi-cartridge configuration and inlet/outlet connection sizes). Once those five are fixed, the housing model is essentially determined. Send your operating data to Pullner’s engineering team — flow rate, pressure, temperature, feed-water analysis, and target effluent — and they will recommend a housing specification and dispatch free samples for evaluation before commitment.

For cartridges, yes — Pullner manufactures direct replacement cartridges for Pall, Parker, CUNO, 3M, HYDAC, Donaldson, Jonell, and Peco using industry-standard end-cap configurations (DOE, 222, 226) and standard cartridge lengths, so Pullner cartridges drop into any of those existing housings. For housings themselves, Pullner can match standard inlet/outlet sizes and mounting footprints for typical replacements — but exact piping clearance, mounting bolt patterns, and connection types should be confirmed against drawings or photographs of your existing installation. Send us your current housing model number, dimensions, and inlet/outlet sizes and our engineering team will quote a like-for-like replacement or an upgrade specification.

All Pullner production runs under ISO 9001 quality management with full raw-material-to-finished-product traceability, plus FDA Compliance Certification on relevant product lines for food, beverage, and pharmaceutical applications. Pullner is the only Chinese filter element supplier approved by Saudi Aramco — a credential requiring documented material traceability, third-party validation testing, and project-by-project quality records, directly relevant for any oil-and-gas, petrochemical, or seawater desalination project specifying Aramco-approved equipment. The in-house testing lab includes a PMI pore size analyzer, field-emission SEM at 3 nm minimum resolution, ICP-MS detection at 20 ppt (meeting G5 grade electronic chemicals requirements), an IFTS single-pass test bench covering 0.5–150 µm efficiency, and a flow resistance bench rated for 10″ to 70″ filter elements. For specific pressure-vessel code stamps such as ASME (US), CE/PED (Europe), or local equivalents, contact our regulatory team with your project specifications — certification scope varies by housing type and target market.