Many of the concentrate plants, was facing the great challenge, of optimizing its operations to achieve the highest levels of efficiency for their filtration systems. Due to the high productivity requirements and over many years of use since the filter press installation, the filters were showing a high degree of wear and misalignment, which reduced their availability due to the extra maintenance required by the filters and considerable unplanned downtime.
 The main needs and potential improvement to the filtrate-concentrate level, which was related to the requirements of VPA vertical filters to increase their production capacity while also increasing the overall reliability of the system.
To achieve higher levels of availability, there are some solutions to optimize and upgrade plan based on using state-of-the-art technology.
-    Upgrading and reinstalling the control systems to the latest technology to achieve maximum percentage of availability and 100% of design capability.
-    The wear parts can replace with new parts using a Nano coating technology for corrosive environments. This improvement  would double the lifetime of the key parts and reducing potential downtime.
-    Using an advanced process control solution to determining the optimal control modes through analyzing the interplay between the selection of fabrics and maintenance events.
-    As the VPA filters discharge as subjected to high rates of wear, causing a reduction in performance, modular design upgrades to the chute can receive maintenance section by section to improve ease of maintenance and thus reduce downtime.