Mechanical separation of particles from liquids represents a cross‐sectional technology, which touches nearly every industrial process, our personal life, and the environment. It is obvious that various physical separation principles and a huge variety of highly specialized apparatuses are needed to solve all separation problems in such different areas of application effectively and economically. Wet cake filtration, in contrast to dry cake filtration for gas cleaning purposes, represents one of the key technologies for solid–liquid separation. This is particularly the case if deliquoring of the separated solid particles is an important issue.

This book should provide a comprehensive overview of more or less all relevant aspects of wet cake filtration. It represents one selected topic among others of the “Karlsruhe School of Solid–Liquid‐Separation,” which was founded in 1979 by Dr.‐Ing. Werner Stahl, Professor for Mechanical Process Engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and refers to 40 years of research, development and teaching in this field. I myself had in 1979 the privilege to become the first PhD student of Stahl and to be part of this group for solid–liquid separation until today under the present guidance of Prof. Dr.‐Ing. habil. Hermann Nirschl. This book is dedicated in great memory to Werner Stahl, who had strongly influenced the mechanical solid–liquid separation technology in general by many innovative developments, which originated in an exceptionally creative atmosphere combined with accurate scientific work. One of his most important tasks was to shorten the gap between academia and industry and for every research project had to be considered not only the scientific attractiveness but also the prospective practical benefit. For this reason, special emphasis is placed in this book on the interdependence of theoretical fundamentals and practical applications.

Besides a detailed presentation of the cake filtration process itself and process‐related topics, such as slurry characterization or slurry pretreatment, special developments from the Karlsruhe School, such as “Hyperbaric Filtration” or “Steam Pressure Filtration” are included, which meanwhile worldwide have been established as the state‐of‐the‐art technology. In addition, promising new, but not jet, commercially available processes, such as “Gasless Cake Desaturation” or “Shrinkage Crack Free Cake Desaturation” are discussed to document the still ongoing evolutionary technical progress.

It would give me great pleasure if this book would support students and teachers from academia as well as engineers from the industry to deepen their knowledge about the physical background of the different cake filtration phenomena and to find out how the fundamentals can be used most effectively to solve practical solid–liquid separation problems.