A baghouse compartment contains many baghouse filter cages, each wrapped with a bag filter of woven or nonwoven material. For cleaning gas streams of less than 250F, the filter material may be pleated instead of a regular bag. The number of baghouse filter surfaces may vary by type but can be anywhere from a half dozen to several hundred.
Dirty air enters through an inlet on its way to the baghouse filters. In larger units, this dusty air may pass through a baffle first, to knock out larger dust particles into the collection hopper.

The polluted air passes through the baghouse filter media surfaces. Depending on the cleaning method of the baghouse collector, the dust may “cake” on the inside or the outside of the filters. When there is no longer air pressure to draw the dirty air through the filters, a sensor is activated, and the cleaning cycle initiates.

In some baghouse units, this will mean the section goes offline for cleaning. This is known as intermittent cleaning. In other units, like pulse jet baghouse units, the filter surface is cleaned with bursts of compressed air, and the different sections of the baghouse never shut down. This is known as continuous cleaning.

As the cleaning cycle goes forward, the caked dust falls from the bag filters, and is deposited into a collection hopper. This dust is moved to a discharge unit for final disposal.

The cleaned air exits the baghouse unit through a clean air outlet.