Oil-water separator system with oleophobic fibrous filter
AssigneeWhatman, Inc.
InventorsJohn J. Ronan, Kenneth A. Perrotta, Paul E. Rebe
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
An oil-water separator system and method to separate contaminated oil and water into clean water and free coalesced oil for collection and removal. The system includes a process tank for the oil and water, a pump to pump the oil and water through first and second stage oil-coalescing filters and through a full depth, fibrous filter under back pressure to provide filtered clean water of selected purity; typically, less than 20 ppm. The coalesced and filtered oil-water is returned and recycled to the process tank wherein a free coalescing oil layer forms on the surface, which free coalesced oil is removed by a belt skimmer for collection and removal.
Claims13
An oil-water separator system to separate contaminated oil-water into clean water and free coalesced oil, which system comprises:
- a) a process tank to receive and contain oil-water to be separated;
- b) an inlet means to introduce oil-water to be separated into the process tank;
- c) a pump to pump oil-water from the process tank;
- d) an oil-coalescing filter means in a housing to remove particulates and to coalesce oil in the pumped oil-water in the housing;
- e) first conduit means to discharge coalesced oil from the coalescing housing into the process tank to form a free coalesced oil layer;
- f) a fibrous, depth, oleophobic filter means in a filter housing to receive pumped, filtered oil-water from the coalescing filter means and the pumped, filtered oil-water to sweep the outside of the oleophobic filter means and to provide filtered clean water of selected purity for discharge, and repelled oil-water in the oleophobic filter housing;
- g) second conduit means to discharge the repelled oil-water into the process tank;
- h) flow control valve means in the second conduit means to control the flow of repelled oil-water to the process tank and to provide back pressure in the upstream side of the oleophobic filter means;
- i) discharge means to discharge said filtered clean water from the oleophobic filter means;
- and
- j) oil removal means to remove the coalesced, free oil layer from the oil-water surface of the process tank.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.