ABSTRACT

This report aims at designing and understanding a framework for the fabrication of a natural filter for
the crude oil filtration process. Waste Water treatment is the process of separating the contaminants
from the waste water. It consists of several physical and chemical processes in order to filter the
elements out of it. Filtration of crude oil is done for removing impurities such as sand, salt, metals and
other organic as well as non-organic contaminants.

Crude Oil is refined using various techniques. Here we would compare crude oil purity using
traditional procedures with the help of the proposed method. Three vessels which are connected by
pipes will be used. First vessel contains crude oil from desert with impurities which will be pumped to
the second vessel with intermediate filter. Two types of natural media are to be used, which has stones
and nut shells in it. The purified crude oil will be collected in the second vessel.

Tank2 Filter Tank1

The effective of the natural media will be studied and suitable modifications of the media will be made
to improve the contaminants removal efficiency. A Filtration and precipitation mix is used for
extracting the heavy metals. And in order to extract the organic materials, air stripping, wet oxidation,
granular carbon, reverse osmosis and ion exchange are used.

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INTRODUCTION

Most lubricating oils and other various products come from the crude oil and for it, crude oil is required
to be refined in a refinery. Refineries take a lot of molecules from the crude oil. Different sizes and
structures of the molecules present in the crude oil helps in producing a large number of products from
the crude oil such as Petrol, Gasoline, Jet fuel, diesel, kerosene and LPG etc. Refineries differentiate
between these molecules responsible for the different products made from the crude oil and these
molecules based on the carbon structures, size and weight are put in the silos and after removing
impurities out of it, final products are manufactured.

Crude Oils can be divided into following four categories:

 Mixed
 Paraffin
 Asphalt
 Naphthenic

Paraffins
In this series, Carbon Atoms are formed by a single chemical bond between them and hydrogen bonds
are saturated from the carbon atoms in the composition of these molecules. The most common paraffin
found in the crude oils is methane. There are several other paraffins belonging to the same series
including propane, ethane, N-Butane and isopentane etc.

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Olefins
Olefins do not persistently exist in the crude oil, but these elements are generated during the filtration
process. There structure is almost similar to the paraffins but in these elements, at least two carbon
atoms are there with double bonds between them. Olefins are one of the most undesirable elements in
the final product as these accelerate the process of oxidization to a large extent. However, in Gasoline,
some quantity of olefins is beneficial.

Naphthenes
Naphthenes are cycloparaffin hydrocarbons in which all the carbon bonds are saturated from hydrogen.
There are several types of Naphthenes present in the crude oil which are classified according to their
boiling points and correlation factors.

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Aromatics
Aromatics are significantly differentiated from Naphthenes and paraffins. These elements contain a
benzene ring that is highly stable and unsaturated. Aromatic hydrocarbons behave like a saturated
compound in the crude oil.

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The objective of the project is to filter out the impurities out of the crude oil as they play a crucial role
in further processing of the product, which we get from crude oil distillation and the crude oil obtained
also need further processing for quality improvement as presence of some impurities nay cause
corrosion and catalyst poisoning. So, impurities and their pre-treatment removal that is very important
and some of the steps in case of the pre-treatment. Whether it is at the site or at the refinery that will be
discussing here and the crude oil desalting process because, there has been lot of the development in
the crude oil desalting, but normally because just to requirement of the process we are the two stage
crude oil desalting. Then the crude oil distillation various stream from the atmospheric and the vacuum
distillation column effect of the crude characteristic on the performance of the distillation. The
impurities when goes in the heat exchanger, gets stuck and block the tubes of the refinery. This ways,
the blockage of impurities actually affect the equipment of the refinery adversely.

As we know, crude oil contains a lot of impurities in it like sand, salt, metals etc. And these impurities
have to be removed so that final products may be refined effectively. In order to filter the impurities out
of it, two processes are used; filtration and desaltation. Refineries are nowadays using a new refining
method that involves filtration using the natural media.

Our scope of the project is limited to the study of the problem and degree of the solutions available for
the crude oil filtration.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Purification of crude oil is the physical separation of a chemical substance from foreign or impure
substances. There are several processes and techniques that are carried out for it, but we are considering
the most efficient of the technique and the main point of concern of the project objective is that the
separation process should be via a natural media.

Filtration is the mechanical process carried out to separate out solids from liquids or gases by a column
of porous sheet supplied through the feed stream. The columnar sheet is usually made up of the cloth or
membrane, which retains the solid and allows the liquid to pass through. Filtration has been the most
popular technique that is being carried out in many of the industrial crude oil refineries based

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worldwide.

Centrifugation is another process of crude oil filtration, but is applicable to the light-weight particles
removal. The crude oil container is revolved at a very high speed with the help of an electric motor,
which would bring up the impurities (light-weighted) high above on the surface and the fine particles
would settle down, thereby separating out the impurities from the whole.

One of the most popular type of filtration techniques involves liquid-liquid extraction which involves
mixing of a solvent, which either is chosen to be the pure oil soluble or the solvent with impurity
affinity, to separate out the impurities in any of the two ways.

Adsorption another popular technique that is carried out to remove soluble impurities from a feed
stream by trapping the impurities on the surf of a solid substance, which usually is a activated carbon
which forms strong non-covalent bonds with the impurities. An example, very popular of the
adsorption technique is the chromatography that employs the adsorption of impurities on a packed bed
of solid to purify multiple components of a single feed stream.

Electrolysis has also been a very popular method, wince time long which involves the breakdown of
substances using an electric current. The supply of high voltage electric current to pass through this
crude oil, removes the impurities from the crude oil. Although this requires tremendous amount power
supply that too with a high voltage.

From among all the processes and the techniques available, we would study the most optimised and
efficient process of all of them which would remove the impurities from the crude oil through the
natural media. Throughout the project, our objective is to find the most optimised method of impurity
removal from crude oil.

DATA ANALYSIS

In this study, we have used three Omani crude oil samples. Each of the sample contains a different
amount of asphaltene. The specifications of the content of the samples are as follows:
Crude oil Place In Iran Asphaltene Density Viscosity at Viscosity
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 content 10C 40C
Labsefid Kuzestan 1.5 0.86 22.74 6.36
Foruzan Khark 4.36 0.88 26.36 8.7
Nowruz Khark 9.51 0.93 599.4 103.6

Two membranes with diameter 0.2 μm and 50 nm were used with following properties.
 length=1016 mm
 Surface area= 0.24 m2
 I.D. of each channel=4 mm
 O.D. =30 mm

A steel surrounding is used for securing the membrane and two O-rings were used for the seal with a
very high melting point.

Filtration kit has membrane surrounding with a pump and two gauges to adjust and monitor the
pressure. Tube side is used to collect the feed and the ball valve in the bottom of the membrane
surrounding is used to collect it. The pump helps the crude oil in the process of circulation and some
part of the oil is recycled to the feed flow tank.

Properties of the Feed Pump:

 10 L/min at a pressure of 10 bars
 Power=0.75 kW AC

Other than the membrane surrounding, pump has a graphite seal that can hold the temperature more
than 2000 C with organic liquids. The feed flow is controlled by transferring some part of the stream to
the tank. Valve is used to control the pressure for the safety purposes. There are several gauges installed
in order to monitor the temperature and the pressure. The stainless steel membrane is also thermally
insulated and in between the process of the filtration, readings are taken every two minutes.

The system is introduced Nitrogen in order to remove any air in the instrument prior to the experiment.
And then 5 liters of oil is put in the tank followed by turning on the heat devices.

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DESIGN

Diagram shows a simple setup that can be used for the filtration of the crude oil. Crude oil is first
processed by a pump for going into the natural media filter, where nut shells and stones are used for the
filtration process. After the filtration, the pure crude oil is collected in another vessel.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

PERMEATE FLUX AND THE REJECTION OF ASPHALTENE

50 nm sized membrane for permeate discharging and rejecting the asphaltene are shown in fig3.

Operating Conditions:
120 °C
200 kPa
Percentage of Asphaltene in the oil: 4.36 wt. %

This experiment was conducted for four hours.

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Size of the Asphaltene elements generally lies between 3 nm and 10 nm. It depends on the nature of the
crude oil. After the increase in the temperature of the crude oil to a specific high temperature, the size
of asphaltene particles of the order of nanometer aggregates to form micrometer size. Now, the
discharge of permeate becomes 1/3rd of its initial value and gains stability with an increase in the
rejection from 20 to 80 wt. %. It is due to the membrane fouling because of the gel layer and blocked
pore formation. The gel layer becomes thick by the introduction of the asphalt particles on its surface.

2. ASPHALT CONTENT AND PORE SIZE EFFECT ON THE MEMBRANE

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Figures 4, 5, and 6 show the resistance of the membrane vs. time for the crude oil samples of different
viscosities and the asphalt content with respect to the pore size of 0.05 and 0.2 μm. The figures well
describes that due to the increase in the gel layer thickness, resistance caused increases with time.
Figures 5 and 6 reveals where resistance is equal to the membranes of different sizes.
If gel layer is formed:
Resistance may be due to the specifications of the fouling material.
If pore blocking is occurred:
Membrane specifications and the material size can cause it.

Clean membrane resistance is a function of membrane specification and permeate viscosity has a strong
effect on resistances. Overall membrane resistance may be limited by clean or fouling resistances.
If the fouling membrane resistance for two membrane sizes is equal to each other, following can be
concluded.
 Limited resistance is not same as the cleaning resistance.
 Membrane surface has now a gel layer on it.

If the fouling membrane resistance for two membrane sizes do not become equal to each other,
following can be concluded.
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  Limited resistance is not same as the cleaning resistance.
 Pore is being blocked.

3. ASPHALT CONTENT AND PORE SIZE EFFECT ON THE MEMBRANE OF PERMEATE

FLUX

As the above figure reveals that with the increase in time, the permeate flux also decreases and after
some time, permeate flux gets stable and becomes same for the both pore sizes. As Fig. 7 depicts, the
permeate flux at the beginning was 18 kg/(m2h). The permeate flux for 3 different crude oil samples is
shown in the Fig. 8 with 0.2 μm pore size.

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According to the Figure 8, the flux of permeate decreased and asphaltene content in crude oil increased.
This phenomenon depicts the gel layer formation for the asphalt content separation. With the hike in
the asphalt content:
 The Gel Layer gets thicker.
 The fouling resistance will increase and permeate flux will be reduced.

According to the pore blocking model, these things can occur due to the varying contents of the
different fouling materials. As the amount of asphaltene increases in the oil samples, there are more
chemical reactions in between the particles resulting in larger asphaltene molecules. Because of it, the
crude oil becomes heavier than before.

4. ASPHALT CONTENT AND PORE SIZE EFFECT ON REJECTION OF THE

ASPHALTENE:

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Fig. 9 reveals that in case of the 0.05 μm pore size, Asphaltene content was having a viscosity of 60%
to 87% and in case of 0.2 nm pore size, the viscosity lied between 44% and 63%.

Furthermore, due to the formation of the gel layer on the surface, a few particles can only pass from the
0.05 μm pore size and if the gel layer is not formed, almost all of the particles will pass through the 0.2
nm pore. Moreover, it is also observed that more is the asphaltene content, more is the rejection.

5. TEMPERATURE EFFECT ON FOULING RESISTANCE:

We used the 0.2 μm size pore for this experiment in order to find the effect of the temperature with
respect to time under different temperature ranges in 100 to 200 0 C. We found that with an increase in
the temperature, there is a significant decrease in the viscosity of the oil and the fouling resistance was
increased with the increase in temperature.

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Conclusion
Crude oil filtration was conducted with ceramic monolith membranes which clarified that the dominant
role in asphaltene separation is played by the gel formation on the membrane surface. Asphaltene
particles are very fine and finer than pore sizes, in spite of this its adsorption takes place at membrane
surface and due to the aggregation of these particles, a gel layer is obtained over the surface which
effectively separates asphaltene particles from crude oil. The gel model well explain that the permeate
flux and fouling resistance is not much affected by the pore size of the membrane. Increasing
asphaltene content in the crude oil resulted in the thicker gel layer formation.

The crude oil founded in Oman contains more impurities than the crude oil in most of the countries.
This is the reason that for Omani Crude Oil, special and much complicated refineries are needed to be
set-up. We also found in our project that filtration process must be executed by using the natural media
only in order to get accurate results or to minimize the impurities present in the crude oil. This process
that we used in this project seems to be more expensive than the other available filtration methods but
however we hope that it will be accurate enough to remove most of the impurities from the crude oil.

Future Work

The future work will be done in workshop and the chemical lab of Caledonian college of engineering,
Oman in semester A of the year 2015-2016.
It will be including following steps:

1. Raw Materials needed for the project will be collected.

2. All the collected materials like vessels, pump, pipe and filter (net shell and stones) will be set

up in the laboratory.

3. Pre-check of the equipment will be done in order to make sure that the project is ready.

4. Crude Oil will be gathered from the desert containing impurities in it.

5. Filtration will be done and deferent prosperities will be noted down before and after the

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 filtration process.

6. Further analysis will be done in the chemical laboratory by using several chemical equipment.

7. Ability of the filter to remove the impurities will be analyzed thoroughly.

8. Finally, we will analyze its capability to run on the large scale i.e. whether this project is

capable of handling more volumes of crude oil in the actual refinery or not.

PROJECT ACTIVITY PLAN

14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ACTIVITY/Weeks

Selection of Title of
the project

Discussion on the
Title of the project
with the supervisor
M
i
d
Literature review
T
e
r
m
Final report and
presentation

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 Future-Work Identifications:
Conclusion
Support for the project by the Govt.
Technological availability
Possible disliking by the residential people.
Risk of harm to the equipment
Time collapse with other identical projects
Uncertainty in the technology
Quality concern for the equipment
Maintenance issue
References
Future Actions
Support Back-drop
Advanced Technology
They need to be explained and convinced about
the project,
Insurance may cover that.
Pre-checking the schedule of other projects.
Deep study may solve the problem.
Doing the quality check
Manually checks after the installation and
choosing the vendor wisely.
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYnGgre83CI

https://www.fkit.unizg.hr/_download/repository/PRPP_2013_Crude_oil_compositio

n.pdf

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Simon_Brassell/publication/232780697_Organi

c_geochemical_indicators_of_palaeoenvironmental_conditions_of_sedimentation/li

nks/0deec529aa4a18cad3000000.pdf

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es960793i

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef990177i

http://www.orpic.om/about-us

http://aem.asm.org/content/66/7/2959.full.pdf

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk0WrtA8_T8

http://www.afpm.org/The-Refinery-Process/

http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/what-we-do/making-fuels-and-

products/how-refining-works.html

http://www.shell.com/src/about-src/refining-process.html

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