Variable-porosity filtering apparatus having compressible filtering medium

Abstract

A filtering apparatus has a volume-changeable filtering chamber having one or more flexible enclosing walls and receiving therein a compressible porous filtering medium, a fluid inlet coupled to the filtering chamber for introducing an input fluid stream with impurities into the filtering chamber, a fluid outlet coupled to the filtering chamber for discharging a filtered fluid stream from the filtering chamber, and a volume-changing structure coupled to or in association with the filtering chamber, adapted to permit increasing or decreasing of the volume of the filtering chamber so as to compress or decompress the compressible porous filtering medium therein so as to correspondingly adjust the pore size of the compressible porous filtering medium in said filtering chamber. A method for flushing a compressible filter media, and a method of variably adjusting the amount of filtering, is further disclosed and claimed.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.