Intensiv-Filter celebrates

The company Intensiv-Filter from Velbert celebrates its ninety-year-old anniversary on the 10th of March, 2012. Founded in 1922, the company succeeded for decades with a special passion for plant engineering and the newest technologies in building up a high-class reputation as one of the leading manufacturers in the field of filter plants and dust removal systems of world rank.

Theodor Hansen stood at the beginning of the company’s history. He founded in Wuppertal a small craftsman’s business in which he developed and built filter plants made of wood. Especially in the coal and steel industry of the close Ruhr area the dust emissions could be reduced significant by the dust removal systems developed by Theodor Hansen. Today exists no branch and procedure-technical process in which dust removal solutions of Intensiv-Filter do not find a use.

In winter, 1930/31 the fast growing company moved to the area of the former national railway repair works in Velbert-Langenberg. In 1940 a branch, which got lost during the Second World War, was established in Katowice to care for the industry of Upper Silesia and Saxony. The partial destroyed factory buildings were rebuilt after the war in Velbert-Langenberg and the area of the national railway with a length of nearly 500 m and a total of 33,000 sqm including own siding tracks was bought. In 1973 the Coanda-injector was patented. With it the foundation-stone was laid to remove the mechanical cleaning of the filter media used till then by the substantially more efficient cleaning by means of air pressure. This development was a ground breaking course for the next decades and is an essential milestone in the development of the company to till this day continuing technological innovations for energy-efficient filter systems.

Intensiv-Filter can look back besides this very interesting and technical innovations larded company history at about 25,000 installed filter plants. The dust removal plants are in use in the ore dressing in the Antarctic Ocean, with the Swedish road construction, on Polish shipyards, in cement works, fertilizer works and asphalt works of the Mid-East, with the magnesite production in the Aegean Sea, with the milk powder production in New Zealand or in South African diamond mines. Already in 1963 the most immense filter plant with 130,000 m³/h volume flow and built till then in Europe was installed south of Paris. Nowadays filter plants up to 3 million m³/h volume flow are no rarity.

Also in the future Intensiv-Filter will remain a family company which will continue the tradition of high-quality filter plants successfully. CEO Frank Schimmelmann adds: “Intensiv-Filter has mastered nearly one century through difficult times and can look back at a unique successful history. This is above all also to be owed to the richness of ideas of the founder Theodor Hansen and the engineer Dr. Heinz Meyer zu Riemsloh, the energy and the persistence of the following generations as well as the vision of the shareholder family. We are looking forward to the future. A long term oriented company strategy and the everyday aim is to assure our customers that performance, quality and innovations are the main issues of our company politics“. Up to this day the company has developed an internationally positioned company group which occupies about 400 employees worldwide and is present by subsidiaries and representations in more than 14 countries.