U.S. company Parker Hannifin has been selected to supply air filters for the Italian Navy and U.S. Navy’s FREMM frigates.
The filters, installed upstream of the air intake of the GE/Avio LM2500+G4 gas turbines, are part of the altair®Neptune filtration system capable of reducing the amount of salt in the air by 99.93%.
Parker has been supporting the activities of the Italian frigates for some time now and now it is also adding its support for the US units currently under construction. On the US Navy’s Constellation or FFG-662 class, which will consist, at least initially, of ten frigates, the altair®Neptune system will also be used for filtering the diesel generators.
The turbines of aircraft-derived ships are very sensitive to the corrosive action of salt.
The altair®Neptune system’s filtering process occurs in three stages or phases.
The first filter stage removes water formed by rain, sea spray and aerosols, while the second stage removes dust and other solid contaminants. The last stage employs a separator to remove any salt that may have remained after the first two stages.