For a hydraulic filter to offer a better performance, in addition to a higher filtration efficiency, it must produce an improved dirt holding capacity and lower pressure drop across the porous media. In this regard, the two-layered media packs are considered to yield the best filtration performance, where the coarser pre-filter layer is intended to trap the bigger particles and the main-filter layer captures the finer contamination. A range of materials with specific filtration properties are available for pre- and main-filter applications, and the right combination of these layers is application dependent.

Combinatorial optimization is the technique to find the best possible choice from a finite set of possibilities. This study aims to explore the filtration properties of available media layers using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to design the efficient two-layered media with prespecified porous properties for each layer...