Separation efficiency of two waste polymer fibers for oily water treatment

Abstract

This work is concerned with the efficiency of two different waste polymeric materials as the filter media in a laboratory-scale bed coalescer in the horizontal fluid flow mode, operating in a steady-state regime. The applied materials are: waste polyethylene terephthalate from textile industry, BA1 and waste polypropylene from carpet industry, PP. Using these compressible fiber polymeric materials, high bed porosity (up to 98%) could be obtained. The investigation was carried out over a wide range of working conditions. Bed permeability was varied in the range from 0.18·10-9 to 5.389·10-9 m2. Operating fluid velocity was varied from 19 to 80 m/h, until the critical velocity was reached. Different oily wastewaters were used in the experiments. Oily wastewater is defined as the oil-inwater emulsion model prepared using mineral oils of different physico-chemical characteristics: crude oil (A) from Vojvodina region, two vacuum distillation fractions (A1, A4), and blended petroleum product with a high paraffinic content (P1). Both applied polymeric materials, BA1 and PP, showed high separation efficiency for treatment of all investigated oily wastewater. However, the BA1 material showed higher efficiency in a wider range of bed permeability and physico-chemical characteristics of oil.