Fluted Filter Paper

I grabbed a coffee filter this morning to make a pot of coffee – something I’ve done hundreds of times – when I had a moment of nostalgia. The coffee filter took me back to my days in organic chemistry class in college when I used to create my own fluted filters for gravity filtration. I can’t tell you why I had the flashback. Perhaps it’s my body trying to deal with the 50 pounds of food I’ve ingested over the past couple of days; who knows.

Fluting filter paper is common practice in high school and college chemistry labs across the country. The process is done to increase the speed of the filtration process and give one a larger surface area onto which to collect the sample. Pretty low tech, but cool nonetheless.