Oil/water emulsions are one of the major threats to environment nowadays, occurs at many stages in the production and treatment of crude oil. The oil recovery process adopted will depend on how the oil is present in the water stream. Oil can be found as free oil, as an unstable oil/water emulsion and also as a highly stable oil/water emulsion. The current study was dedicated to the application of microbubble air flotation process for the removal of such oily emulsions for its characters of cost-effective, simple structure, high efficiency and no secondary pollution. The influence of several key parameters on the process removal efficiency was examined, namely, initial oil concentration, pH value of the emulsion, and the effect of adding sodium chloride. The effect of bubble size on the performance of the separation process and its impact on removal efficiency was also investigated. The results demonstrated that removal efficiency obtained by using microbubbles flotation was higher by factor of 1.72 in comparison with that achieved with fine bubbles. The removal efficiency of oil droplets was increased with the increasing of flotation time and initial oil concentration. The removal efficiency reached up 60.68% under alkaline conditions (pH≈9), and it increased to around 75% by decreasing the emulsion acidity to around (pH≈3). The addition of sodium chloride has a significant influence to the efficiency of the flotation process. The efficiency could be reached to about 84% by adding 1 gL−1of NaCl to the emulsion. While increasing the NaCl concentration to 9 gL−1resulted in reduction in removal efficiency to around 80%.
Among several separation processes, the air flotation distinguish as remarkably high potential separation process related to its high separation efficiency and throughput, energy-efficient, simple process, cost-effective, applicable to a wide range of oily wastewater and no by-products. The current study aimed to investigate the effect of the type and concentration of surfactant on the stability of oil-water emulsion and efficiency of the separation process. For this purpose, three types of surfactant where used (anionic SDS, mixed nonionic Span 85/Tween 80, and cationic CTAB). The results demonstrated that the Span 85/Tween 80 surfactant has the best stability, and it increases with the surfactant concentration augmentation. The removal ef
... Show MoreIn the current study, a novel approach for separating ethanol-water mixture by microbubble distillation technology was investigated. Traditional distillation processes require large amounts of energy to raise the liquid to its boiling point to effect removal of volatile components. The concept of microbubble distillation by comparison is to heat the gas phase rather than the liquid phase to achieve separation. The removal of ethanol from the thermally sensitive fermentation broths was taken as a case of study. Consequently the results were then compared with those which could be obtained under equilibrium conditions expected in an “ideal” distillation unit. Microbubble distillation has achieved vapour compositions higher than th
... Show MoreIn this study, we fabricated nanofiltration membranes using the electrospinning technique, employing pure PAN and a mixed matrix of PAN/HPMC. The PAN nanofibrous membranes with a concentration of 13wt% were prepared and blended with different concentrations of HPMC in the solvent N, N-Dimethylformamide (DMF). We conducted a comprehensive analysis of these membranes' surface morphology, chemical composition, wettability, and porosity and compared the results. The findings indicated that the inclusion of HPMC in the PAN membranes led to a reduction in surface porosity and fiber size. The contact angle decreased, indicating increased surface hydrophilicity, which can enhance flux and reduce fouling tendencies. Subsequently, we evaluated the e
... Show MoreIn the present work, asphaltenes and resins separated from emulsion samples collected from two Iraqi oil wells, Nafut Kana (Nk) and Basrah were used to study the emulsion stability. The effect of oil resins to asphaltene (R/A) ratio, pH of the aqueous phase, addition of paraffinic solvent (n-heptane), aromatic solvent (toluene), and blend of both (heptol) in various proportions on the stability of emulsions had been investigated. The conditions of experiments were specified as an agitation speed of 1000 rpm for 30 minutes, heating at 50 °C, and water content of 30%. The results showed that as the R/A ratio increases, the emulsion will be unstable and the amount of water separated from emulsion increases. It was noticed that the em
... Show MoreThe effect of three ionic liquids viz., 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (ILE), 1-hexyl-3-metylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate (ILF) and 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (ILG) when used as surfactants on the performance of dissolved air floatation (DAF) was investigated.
Experiments were conducted at a temperature of 30-35 ºC, 10ppm ferric chloride as coagulant, 50% recycle ratio, pH 8, and 10 minutes treatment time to find oil and grease (OG) and turbidity removal efficiencies at saturation pressure (2-6) bar.
ILs were used at concentration of 50 µl/liter of treated water in two positions in DAF system; the saturation vessel and the treatment tank. The performance using ILs
... Show MoreThe aim of present work is to study the removal of phenol present in aqueous feed solution by the emulsion liquid membrane technique using kerosene as a diluent, sodium hydroxide as a stripping agent, and sorbitan monooleate (Span 80) as a surfactant. The parameters studied were: surfactant concentration, volume ratio of membrane phase to internal phase, and stirring speed. It was found that more than 98% of phenol can be removed at the conditions were surfactant concentration 2% (v/v), volume ratio of membrane phase to internal phase 5:1 and stirring speed 400 rpm. Maximum phenol extraction efficiency at 7 minutes of process time was observed. It was found that there was a good agreement between the standard kerosene an
... Show MoreA microbubble air flotation technique was used to remove chromium ions from simulated wastewater (e.g. water used for electroplating, textiles, paints and pigments, and tanning leather). Experimental parameters were investigated to analyze the flotation process and determine the removal efficiency. These parameters included the location of the sampling port from the bottom of the column, where the diffuser is located to the top of flotation column (30, 60, and 90 cm), the type of surfactant (anionic, SDS, or cationic, CTAB) and its concentration (5, 10, 15, and 20 mg/L), the pH of the initial solution (3, 5, 7, 9, and 11), the initial contaminant concentration (10, 20, 30, and 40 mg/L), the gas flow rate (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5 L/mi
... Show MoreIn this paper flotation method experiments were performed to investigate the removal of lead and zinc. Various parameters such as pH, air flow rate, collector concentrations, collector type and initial metal concentrations were tested in a bubble column of 6 cm inside diameter. High recoveries of the two metals have been obtained by applying the foam flotation process, and at relatively short time 45 minutes . The results show that the best removal of lead about 95% was achieved at pH value of 8 and the best removal of zinc about 93% was achieved
at pH value of 10 by using 100 mg/l of Sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS) as a collector and 1% ethanol as a frother. The results show that the removal efficiency increased with increasing initial m