The new Sartorius prefilters feature a combination of high performance polyethersulfone (PES) membranes and nanofleece technology. Sartorius says that this is the first time that PES nanofleece material is being used for liquid prefiltration applications in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The newly developed nanofleece technology provides an ultrafine fleece structure based on a small nanofibre diameter of 120-150 nm compared with the fibre diameter of conventional fleece materials of >500 nm. The resulting fleece structure offers enhanced clarification capabilities, even for extremely fine contaminants, along with a high-dirt holding capacity, fast flow rates and high total throughput performance.Sartoguard NF prefilters are the ideal choice for downstream protection of more expensive sterilising-grade and Mycoplasma-retentive filters in challenging prefiltration applications for biopharmaceutical manufacturing. In combination with their high total throughput performance, Sartoguard NF prefilters offer significant cost-saving potential due to their ultrafine retention performance, which ensures removal even of extremely small particulate-based contaminants. All active filter materials – membranes and nanofleece – of the new prefilter series are made of polyethersulfone, thus ensuring a minimum extractable footprint. This enables users to easily implement Sartoguard NF into existing filtration processes utilising final filters already based on PES.
