Abstract
Bed coalescers are compact, easy to install, automate, and maintain with the ability to achieve high separation efficiencies. They have been increasingly applied in the industry even though their design often requires pilot plant experiments. In this paper, a new wetting property of polymer fibers regarding polar mineral oils was established. This property can be important for selection of filter media for liquid-liquid separation in many industrial applications. Medical oil was selected as the new reference liquid that does not wet the investigated polymers. The lipophilic/lyophobic ratio (LLR) reached values ranging from 3.28 to 18.81 and increased with the increase of the mineral oil polarity measured by the oil neutralization number. The LLR values were in an excellent agreement with the results obtained from the separation efficiency of a steady-state bed coalescer. Thus, simple, fast and inexpensive experiments can replace pilot plant or at least laboratory testing aiming at selecting a polymer for oil separation from wastewater.
Highlights
Quantity of industrial oily water permanently increases, as well as accidental oil spills
From the published literature, the most important factors that influence the bed coalescence efficiency have been already investigated in detail, such as: working conditions, fluid flow orientation, bed geometry, bed length and wettability of filter media [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
The polymer fibre bed must separate oil from oily water having a wide range of different properties that are not existent in diesel dehydration investigated by Kulkarni
Summary
Quantity of industrial oily water permanently increases, as well as accidental oil spills. The emulsion separation has become an important operation in chemical processes for liquid extraction, direct contact heat transfer, effluent treatment and purification of fuels or chemicals. For efficient oil separation from wastewater, it is highly important to identify following parameters: emulsion flow rate, phase ratio and emulsion stability. Even though many separation techniques for oil-in-water emulsions have been proposed [1,2], the steady-state bed coalescence has been proven to be the most suitable. Considering that bed coalescers are compact, easy to install, automate, and maintain, achieving high separation efficiencies, they have been increasingly applied in the industry even though their design often requires pilot plant experiments. From the published literature, the most important factors that influence the bed coalescence efficiency have been already investigated in detail, such as: working conditions, fluid flow orientation, bed geometry, bed length and wettability of filter media [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
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