Hello,
I am looking for the best method for cleaning metal sintered/porous sparger stones. The stones are used in fed-batch process' of VCD 40x10^6. I have tried soaking the spargers in Pepsin overnight and HCL but 1. do not have a recipe for this and 2. this did not have any significant effect on the quality of sparging. I have access to a sonicator bath. any cleaning method would be appreciated
Thank you!
You could try sonication, but this might disintegrate the stone, depending on how strongly the particles are fused (happened to me with a plastic stone from an aquarium shop ;-( ).
Since you mentioned pepsin, I assume the problem is pores of the stone get clogged with protein. In that case, I'd try 1 M NaOH and use a pump to circulate the NaOH through the stone over night. If need be, warm it up gently to 30-40 °C. Of course, that would not work with aluminium or other metals that react with NaOH and afterwards you would need to thoroughly rinse the stone first with water, then with your medium.
Please look at the following below links which may help you in your analysis:
https://www.teesing.com/files/downloads/filters-whitepapers/mott-sintered-metal-filtration-technology-for-industrial-wastewater-management.pdf
https://techblog.ctgclean.com/2015/08/effect-part-porosity-cleaning-rinsing/
https://www.filsonfilters.com/porous-sparger
Thanks
I tried just about everything... For a stainless 2 um stone, the best method I found was 1% SDS in 0.5M NaOH with high pressure reverse flow. You may need to build custom tubing to achieve this. It takes a lot of solvent. Sonication can work too, with less consumption. But these things buy only so much time. In my hands there's no way to maintain them forever.
In retrospect it's not clear what I was hoping to accomplish there. Today I just exchange them every few score runs. They're not expensive!
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