A little background.

Oil and aqueous media

Oil/water separation is common in industry, and waste water is an obvious application, but Suparator® has proven to be even more valuable in oil control for precious process fluids like aqueous cleaner, machine coolant, cooling water, steam condensate etc.

Other oil separation devices

One type of devices used for non-critical applications are adhesion skimmers. A belt, hose or disc, moves through a layer of oil, causing the oil to adhere to the surface and be carried off. The most commonly used group of oil separators are gravity separators, with or without coalescing. Other devices, used for oil separation, although not really suitable, are membrane filtration and centrifuges.

Gravity separation

Gravity separators make use of the fact that oil and water do not mix. If left to settle, an oil/water mixture will separate, due to gravity, with the lighter oil floating on top of the heavier water phase. Gravity separation takes time.

Coalescing

Smaller oil drops in an oil/water mixture will separate slowly or not at all. Coalescing media is placed in an oil separator to catch and accumulate the finer oil drops, and merge them into larger drops that separate quickly.