Separation of Emulsified Oil from Industrial Wastewater Using Poly Silicate Ferro-Aluminum Sulphate (PSFAS): A Novel Methodology for the Attainment of Very High Separation Efficiency

The large amount of wastewater generated from textile industries, petroleum industries, chemical industries contains heavy metals, suspended solids, hazardous waste, oils, fatty acids, dyes, pigment etc. It is very important to improve the quality of contaminated water before it discharges into the water sources or use. In the current work, an efficient methodology has been developed to separate emulsified oil from wastewater. The emulsified oil is tried to separate by using poly silicate Ferro aluminium sulphates, a flocculent. In addition to the above, the maximum separation efficiency for the devolved process is also revealed. Using PSFA, up to 93.5 % separation efficiency is achieved, and the discussed methodology can separate emulsified forms of the oil without altering the efficiency. The dissolved solid and metal content are also considered as the controlling parameters for the separation efficiency. The optimum TDS and the metal content must be maintained at 560 mg/L and 2 mg/L, respectively, to attain maximum separation efficiency.

Foam Generation in the Presence of Residual Oil in Porous Media

This paper studies the effect of trapped, emulsified oil on the requirement for the geometrical Roof snap-off for foam generation in a porous medium. We extend an existing hydrodynamic pore-level model to describe the liquid accumulation in an appropriately-sized pore in the presence of oil. The effect of oil is simulated by adjusting the pore shape to be asymmetrical as observed in microfluidic experiments with residual oil. We alter the boundary and initial conditions of the problem to test various scenarios. Specifically, four cases are presented. The liquid accumulation is presented when the amount of wetting liquid volume connected to the pore is altered through changing the boundary conditions (cases 1 and 2). Moreover, the effect of drier surrounding medium and/or drier pores is also tested by increasing either the capillary pressure surrounding the pore or the capillary pressure of the pore itself (cases 3 and 4). We find that the presence of residual oil affects the liquid accumulation times when there is no external liquid pressure gradient applied. Additionally, residual oil presence makes the Roof snap-off criterion for liquid accumulation stricter. To augment our pore-level study, we use a statistical pore network to observe the effect of the microscopic changes observed in our pore-level model macroscopically. Our results indicate that a stricter Roof snap-off criterion leads to fewer germination sites for lamellae generation. Our pore network analysis computes the generation rate constant to be as much as four times larger in the absence of oil than in its presence. Results suggest that changes to the shape of pore constrictions by emulsified oil reduce the effectiveness of foam generation.