Welcome to your relevant solution, a podcast powered by relevant industrial. In each episode, we'll explore how relevant brings together the finest technicians, engineers and designers in the world to help industrialized businesses find answers and deliver results. Got a crisis brewing? We have your solution. Your relevant solution. Hello, everyone and welcome to a podcast brought to you by relevant industrials I'm your host for today, Gabriel, and I'm so excited to be joined by right now by Roger Frakes. And he's actually the VP of switch filtration at relevant industrials. We're going to be talking about the importance of good filtration within the B2B industrial manufacturing space. So this is just a conversation you are not going to want to miss. So welcome, Roger. Hey, Gabby. Thanks for having me this morning. Yes you know, industrial filtration is a lot different than what a lot of people are exposed to in normal life. I mean, you have air filters in your home. You've got the oil changes that you have to make. So there's some correlation there to what we do in the industrial space, which filtration is kind of a niche filter marketplace that we go after. We focus on the rotating equipment industry that gets used across many different marketplaces or used for generating power at power stations with gas turbines. They're used on compressors for refineries and getting the oil out of the deep sea platforms and then chemical and other industries. It's just endless. The industries, I mean, good filtration solutions are needed across pretty much every B2B industry in the space. You know what, I want to go ahead and start off this podcast by asking just what's your name, your title, and just what it is do within your industry to give our audience a little bit of background. OK yeah, my name is Roger Frakes and I'm with relevant industrials. And my focus is which filtration? This is a company that's owned by relevant industrials and. Switch filtration is focused on this marketplace. And I'm the VP and general manager of that group. Fantastic well, you know, we started to branch off into this conversation naturally, but, you know, filtration just plays a crucial role. In just what way specifically? I mean, if you had a chance to tell the audience to straight up ultimately. And what ways does filtration matter at the end of the day? Yeah, filtration for this marketplace is very critical. These pieces of equipment that the filtration supports have to run 24/7 and you can't have any downtime because of a filtration issue. Many of the filter housings that are used in this space have a dual filter housing that can be switched over if you need to make a routine change out so it can continually run and. It supports the livelihood of that industry for sure. You know, throughout your experience, a career, I'm sure you've just had a lot of firsthand experiences yourself, maybe where you realized like, this is a perfect example to cite why we need good filtration solutions in the first place. Do you have any stories of that accounts? Sure yeah, we're filtration. You know where I've seen firsthand. Where a filter element can make a huge difference in an operation. We had a situation where a major oil company in the Gulf Coast refinery, they had a couple of major shutdowns. One of them cost them over $5 million in equipment, repairs, and downtime. So the next one came across the over $20 million in downtime and equipment that failed. And the root cause was a filtration maybe not the filter element. Failing, but installation issues that did cause the filter element to be bypassed and contaminated fluid went by and destroyed the equipment. So that was the start of where one of our sales people had left a brochure with the customer. They weren't happy with the way the current filter manufacturer and representative of that equipment was providing the filter elements. They said, there's got to be a better way. So things get done right. And they ended up calling our sales guy. And I went in and worked with the rotating equipment engineer to find out what the issue was, what kind of things they wanted to do to make the filter element replacement. Something that's going to be done consistently every time. And what we ended up doing is creating a filter element kit for the customer. Because when you're dealing with the filter element, you have the filter element. It has to have a ring on it. So it seals properly and. On top of that, when you. Remove it from the housing. These are usually pretty high pressure vessels and they have multiple rings and backup rings to make sure that no fluid gets out of the filter housing. And it's really critical that those are put in properly, that they're replaced every time you replace a filter element so you don't have an issue. And those o-rings are so critical. Just this past weekend. Kind of reminded me of how critical o-rings can be because. Watching the news, there was another piece of the space shuttle Challenger that was recovered out of the ocean. And that's an example of where an O-ring caused a catastrophic failure and we treat at switch filtration. You know, these filter element kits, like they're protecting a shuttle launch. So what we ended up doing and working out for the customer to meet all their needs is we ended up putting the filter element in a well protected box and switch filtration. We vacuum seal every part before it goes out to the customer because they may be going into severe environmental conditions like we have filter elements that go to Saudi Arabia, we have filter elements that go out on platforms with saltwater air. So they have to be well protected. But back to this kit for this major refinery, we ended up having the filter element like we normally do, but with the vacuum sealing. But we also provided the O-ring kit. So when the. The o-rings are all there. So if the technician is going out to change the filter element, he doesn't have to hunt for all the separate o-rings because some of these kits can have five different o-rings, and they have to be put precisely in the right place to have a successful installation. So on top of the vacuum seal filter, the o-rings being also vacuum sealed with grease. We also provided. A joint installation instruction that we provide every time with the filter element kit. So the technician now can just go to the shelf, get our filter element kit off the shelf, throw it in the back of his truck, drive out to the piece of equipment, do the replacement of the filter element, and know that he's got everything he needs to do it successfully. And we've been working with them for four or five years since that catastrophic event. We've had great success ever since. I love to hear it. So it sounds like it's simplify the process a lot more. And o-rings filter kits. Where does nano filtration fit into all of this? What is this solution and just how are you seeing it make a difference? Like you have these filtration kits and o-rings across all markets. Right so nano filtration is kind of the new frontier for filtration, in my opinion. We've been working in this inline filter business for geez, I've been involved for 15 years. Our company has been involved for over 30 years. And inline filtration. You have to deal with the. The specific piece of equipment. So they size the filter housing for that particular flow and primarily in lube oils and liquid fuel or diesel fuel. Nano filtration is becoming an area that's going to be growing and can really help with the longevity the equipment the. Performance of the oil and the environment. So when you're looking at this nano filtration back to the in-line filtration. It's typically between 40 microns down to 3 microns and has to work in the system. So if you go any tighter than that, the filter may not be able to handle the pressure that is required or the pump may not be able to pump through the filter at a rate to make the filter work properly. So nano filtration is done more like in a kidney loops situation where it's an offline filter application inline. You've got the filter, the pump and the reservoir and it runs through that, through the equipment. And with the filtration, you would have just a separate kidney loop that just cleans the oil in the tank and it starts around 3 microns and goes down to like 0.1 micron on the size of particles that it's removing. So, you know, we're talking nanometers in sizes on how to measure that instead of microns, which is micrometers. So it's a whole other step change in the level of filtration. And we're seeing where we're able to remove the small particles that cause oxidation, that causes varnish, which causes the engines to have to be rebuilt and valves to stick. And, you know, just a whole myriad of bad things that happen when you have oxidation in your oil or your diesel fuel. And this nano filtration is getting the oxidation out so much and keeping the oil clean that it's saving the environment by not having to change out the oil as much. It's saving the equipment, making the equipment last longer. There's many studies that talk about clean oil and how it extends the life of a piece of rotating equipment. And you either have to change your oil out, often to make it successful, or you can have the proper filtration to get down to that level that'll clean the oil. And in turn, that clean oil will actually clean the engine and make it last longer. Well, you mentioned that nano filtration, you see it kind of as the new frontier of filtration. So I wanted to ask you, where does delta 0 factor into all of this? Well, delta 0 came up with a different. Filtration media. That's the heart of their nano filtration technology. Instead of having a traditional pleated filter. I mean, if you look at your filter in your air conditioning system, it's got the pleats that you collect. It gives you more surface area to collect dust. And dirt out of the stream of air, in our case of air filters. But this nano filtration, the filter element, is a patented technology that has these nanopores that go through the whole filter and has a long labyrinth path that does a great job of taking out the smaller particles that traditional in-line filtration has never been able to get down to those levels with. Well, you know, as we begin to start closing up this conversation, Roger, you know, what do you think after this conversation we've had involving all of this new tech, nano filtration, all of these important things, what do you think is one of the more important factors in good filtration that most people you think just aren't aware of and that our audience listening in should know about? Yeah, there's a couple of things. One of the things that people overlook when in our industry is. Is the capacity of the filter. In many cases, the OEM of. No gas turbine company will specify the filter for the lube oil of that piece of equipment. And a lot of times the customer is focused on that initial capital investment in that filter. But they don't think about the oil changes or how many filters you're going to have to replace because you under size it you won the business, but the operator, the end user of that equipment isn't going to be happy. If he's going to spend five times as much as that filter cost originally in annual filter element changes. So that gets overlooked. And that's something that we're experts on. We can help size filter housings. We can look at your situation and say, you know, we can look at the process conditions and the micron rating and see if it is undersized and maybe the right solution is to replace that filter for the end user and give him a better solution for better filtration and less oil changes. And then. You know, I just think this nano filtration another thing would be that. It's kind of a neat solution because you don't have to be in line like traditional filtering filtering to be successful. And we've got several different pieces of equipment, more on the size of the reservoir that the piece of equipment is attached to instead of dealing with the process. So we can take their bulk storage unit for diesel or the storage unit on the oil reservoir and set up one of these filtration kidney loop systems, plug it in, just let it run. And it's really great because it doesn't take much attention to. Clean up the oil so well. Roger, where do you think the future is headed for filtration, especially within b2b, industrial manufacturing? I think just more like what we're doing, we're not just providing part numbers. So many people just are in the aftermarket business and they have the OEM part number and they just go and replace it and. You know, we're kind of unique in looking at it holistically and making sure that the customer has the right filtration solution for their particular equipment. Fantastic well, that closes out the conversation for today. So a big Thank you to Roger for joining us on today's conversation. Just giving an overall overview of filtration within the B2B industrial manufacturing space. We learned a lot. Most definitely. So Thank you, Roger. Thank you. And as always, if you want to learn more, please feel free to reach out to Roger. Roger, how can people get in touch with you to learn more? Sure, you can look for me on LinkedIn or you can take a look and contact us through the website. Our switch filtration branded products. That's switch filtration. Fantastic well, Thanks for everyone listening in.
