Animated rotary tilting pan vacuum filter for a wet-process phosphoric acid plant, with the complete gypsum filtration plant built around it. The pan and cam geometry is taken from two US patents for real machines, US 4,675,107 and US 4,721,566, so the mechanism moves the way the real one does. Every pipe in the plant is connected to something, and the audit script that proves it is included. Native Blender 5.1 scene plus animated FBX, glTF, USD and Alembic, and a static OBJ.

Built for fertiliser and chemical engineering visualisation, process animation, training and e-learning, digital twin and HMI backdrops, industrial renders and technical marketing.

THE MACHINE

• 18 m rotating deck, 30 tilting pans, 185 m2 of filter cloth
• The patented parallelogram pan cross-section: 1.86 m wide pans swing through 180 degrees with only 25 mm between them, because both side walls lean 15 degrees
• Every pan has a perforated drainage deck, filter cloth, clamping bars, end trunnions, a filtrate outlet coaxial with the pivot, counterweights and a two-roller cam fork
• A fixed cam channel generated from the pan motion itself, so the rollers sit on the rail at every frame. Each pan inverts 172.6 degrees over the discharge chute and comes back the way it went
• Central rotary distribution valve with 30 radial filtrate pipes, bridge blocks and five vacuum zone offtakes
• Hub, radial and ring girders, 15 twin-wheel bogies on a circular rail, a 348-tooth girth gear, pinion, gearbox and motor on a pedestal

FULLY ANIMATEDOne revolution over 600 frames, 25 seconds at 24 fps. That is 4.8 times faster than the real machine, which turns at 0.5 rev/min, so the motion reads clearly in a short clip, and the README explains how to play it at real speed. Every pan tips once per revolution on its keyed cam profile. The gypsum cake forms at the feed box, grows through the formation zone and drops into the chute. The motion is driven by the empties TABLE and PAN_01 to PAN_30 and is baked into the FBX, glTF, USD and Alembic files.

PROCESS STATIONSFeed box and three counter-current wash boxes on bridges from a central mast, spray headers, fume hood with extract duct, open discharge chute with sluice sprays, gypsum launder, cloth wash spray bars under the inverted pans, drip trays, and a maintenance platform with grating, handrails, stairs, ladders and an operator panel.

THE PLANT AROUND ITFive vacuum filtrate receivers with tangential inlets, level bridles, manways, caged ladders and top platforms. Nine centrifugal pump sets, each with baseplate, volute, coupling guard, finned motor, suction valve and a discharge riser with check valve, gate valve and gauge. Two liquid-ring vacuum sets, a bunded product acid tank with transfer pump, a pond water tank, an agitated slurry surge tank, a fume scrubber with fan and stack, and a gypsum sump with vertical slurry pump. A circular six-tier pipe rack carries every line with the vacuum header on top. The wash liquors cascade counter-currently exactly as they do in a real dihydrate filter, and three lines leave the plot at marked battery limits.

VERIFIED, NOT JUST MODELLEDThe included Python audit checks the scene four ways and reports zero on each one. All 112 pipe ends land on a nozzle, a pipe or a vessel. No vessel nozzle is left open. No pipe passes through steel, equipment or another pipe. No fixed part touches the rotating table anywhere in a full revolution, checked by sweeping the table through its repeat in half-degree steps.

PARAMETRIC GENERATOR INCLUDEDThe whole scene is built by Python scripts in which every dimension is a named constant. Change the pan count, the deck radius, the zone angles or the plant layout and rebuild the scene in about five seconds. Run the audit again afterwards to prove the result is still clean.

TECHNICAL

• 875 objects, 807 meshes, 457,536 vertices, 346,630 faces, 793,828 triangles
• 33 physically based Principled BSDF materials, procedural, with no texture maps and no UV unwrapping needed
• Real-world scale in metres, Z up, origin at the machine centre on grade
• 11 collections, so the filter can be used on its own without the plant around it
• 17 preset cameras, sun and fill lights, physical sky
• Renders in EEVEE and Cycles with no add-ons, Blender 5.1 or newer
• Every object is named by its function, for example PAN_07, R-101, P-103

FORMATS

• Blender 5.1 .blend, native and animated
• FBX binary, animated
• glTF 2.0 binary .glb, animated
• USD .usdc, animated, with materials
• Alembic .abc, animated, geometry and motion only
• OBJ with MTL, static, zipped together
• Python generator and documentation

PLEASE NOTEThe exchange formats carry base colour, metallic and roughness but not the procedural noise and bump, and the alpha-patterned grating and drainage decks come out as solid plates. The OBJ is static, so use FBX, glTF, USD or Alembic for the motion. Alembic carries geometry and animation without materials, which is how the format works. The plant around the filter is sized by engineering judgement rather than copied from one specific plant. This is a visualisation model built to engineering conventions, not a fabrication or CAD deliverable.