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Oily Wastewater Recycling

Be it for regulation reasons (to meet local discharge requirements or to minimize haul-away cost) or for economical reasons (to recycle cleaners or solvents) or for both reasons, the demand for oily wastewater treatment is commonly found in machine shops and many industries. Conventional technologies, such as coalescers and oil water separators (OWSs), which employ decantation and coalescing for oil and water separation, can remove the majority of  oil from water if there are no surfactants present. Unfortunately, surfactants (such as detergents, cleaners, or oil additives) are commonly found in oily wastewater. The Surfactants Function as Emulsion Stabilizers and they prevent oil droplets from coalescing. In many cases, the shear force from the transfer pump in a process system can break down the emulsified oil droplets even further (typical highly emulsified oil droplets are in the range of 0.5 to 10 microns) to make things worse. This renders conventional oily wastewater treatment equipment ineffective. 

Reduce Waste Volume by 90-98% 

FSI offers membrane filtration for wastewater treatment. FSI's WRS Systems, with processing capacities from 50 gallons to over 500,000 gallons per day, are designed for treating end-of-pipe oily wastewater streams. They reduce the volume of wastewater to be hauled or treated in-house with expensive chemicals and labor by 90-98%. Industrial wastewaters, containing varying levels of oil and grease from machine coolants, tramp oils, wash water and mop water, must have the oils removed before being sewered. With FSI's WRS Systems, oil and suspended solids are concentrated by the fouling-resistant hydrophilic filter cartridge, producing filtrate (permeate) that can meet or exceed all government sewer requirements for oil and grease levels or can be recycled for maximum savings.

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The hydrophilic membrane's ability to handle high levels of 'free' and emulsified oils is especially important in waste minimization applications since it allows FSI's WRS Systems to withstand widely varying feed changes which would foul most competitive systems. Users who have experienced problems with other membrane systems will recognize the importance of handling such system upsets. FSI also supplies a variety of post-treatment technologies for those applications that require high purity recycled water. For challenging fluids, such as those found in high solids content or colloidal solids applications, FSI's patented CMF microfiltration system can be used as a prefilter before the WRS.

FSI's WRS Line of wastewater treatment systems is ideal for waste volume minimization and/or recycling of aqueous based cleaners and rinse water from a variety of industrial applications, including: 

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