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Procedia Environmental Sciences 10 (2011) 158 – 162

2011 3rd International Conference on Environmental

Science and Information Application
Conference Title Technology (ESIAT 2011)

Application of Fibrous Coalescer in the Treatment of Oily

Wastewater
Hongliang Zhaoa, Guoyi Li b,*
a
Construction Development Bureau, Administrative Commission of Tianjin Dongjiang Free Trade Port Zone, Tianjin 300463,
China
b
Key Laboratory of Environmental Protection in Water Transport Engineering Ministry of Communications, Tianjin Research
Institute of Water Transport Engineering, Tianjin 300456, China

Abstract

When treating oily wastewater, fibrous coalescer technology has the advantages of convenient operation, longer
service period of coalescence materials, high oil removal efficiency, without additional reagent, high ability in value
maintenance of recovered oil, thus has attracted increased interests in recent years. Extensive research has been done
to investigate the theoretical oil-removal mechanism, and lots of works have been conducted to explore the
application of fibrous coalescer in the treatment of various refractory wastewaters, especially oily wastewater. This
paper provides an instruction of coalescence principles, materials and equipments, as well as its development and
application.
© 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Conference ESIAT2011 Organization Committee.
Keywords: coalescer; coalescence materials; coalescence equipment; oily wastewater

1. Instruction

With the development of economy and water transport, consumption of petroleum and related
fabricated products keeps increasing. This will bring out great deal of oily wastewater, resulting in serious
environmental pollution. At present, the conventional oily wastewater treatment processes include air
floatation, membrane separation, chemical coagulation, chemical oxidation, physical adsorption,
biodegradation, and so on [1-5]. However, these traditional technologies have often encountered some

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +86-22-59812345; fax: +86-22-59812357.

E-mail address: li_guoyi@126.com.

1878-0296 © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Conference ESIAT2011 Organization Committee.
doi:10.1016/j.proenv.2011.09.028
 Hongliang Zhao and Guoyi Li / Procedia Environmental Sciences 10 (2011) 158 – 162 159

problems, such as complex procedures, poor performances, high operation cost, high management
requirement, without oil recovery [6]. In comparison, fibrous coalescer has the advantages of simple
device requirement, convenient operation, long operation cycle of coalescence materials, without need of
power and external chemicals, high removal efficiency of oil, and high using value of recovered oil [7, 8].
Therefore, fibrous coalescer technology has attracted great attention for the treatment of oily wastewater.

2. Oil removal principle of fibrous coalescer

The basis for oil removal by fibrous coalescer is the Stokes’ Law [9]:

v = g (ȡy-ȡe )d2/(18ȝ) (1)

In which, v is the rising velocity of oil droplets with the diamenter d, cm/s; g is the acceleration of
gravity, cm/s2; ȝ is the fluid viscosity, g/cm/s; ȡy is the density of water, g/cm3; ȡe is the density of oil,
g/cm3.
It can be seen that rising velocity v is proportional to the square of oil size d, which is the oil removal
principle of fibrous coalescer. When the oily wastewater flows through coalescence bed, micro oil
particles are entrapped and absorbed by lipophilic material; while, they collapse with each other and
aggregate together when the oleophobic material is used. Finally, all the entrapped and absorbed oil
particles and the aggregated particles grow to larger oil droplets with diameter increasing by 1000-fold.
Hence, the corresponding rising velocity v increases by 10002-fold. Thus, these oil droplets can be easily
separated from water. In addition, the oil property and using value does not change in the whole process,
and thereby the oil can be removed and reused. Dispersed oil and emulsified oil stabilized by non-
surfactant with droplet size more than 10ȝm, can be removed by the fibrous coalescer technology [6, 10,
and 11].

3. Coalescence materials for oil removal

Above analysis shows that the entrapping and absorbing capacity of coalescence materials play key
roles in oil removal. Surface properties of the coalescence materials have a pronounced effect on fibrous
coalescer process. The ideal coalescence materials should have great oil absorption capacity. Meanwhile,
the absorbed oil particles should not wildly spread on the surface of coalescence materials. The optimum
spreading angle should be kept at 70-80° [7], when oil particles absorb to the material surface and
aggregate together, but not wildly spread.
At present, the traditional coalescence materials include polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC),
styrene-butadiene rubber, ceramist, quartz sand, anthracite, serpentine, exchange resin, fibre, modified mc
nylon, abs engineering plastics, carbon steel, stainless steel, fibreglass, and so on. The properties of some
common coalescence materials are listed in Table 1, which can be divided into three sorts.

3.1. Natural coalescence materials

Natural coalescence materials mainly include anthracite, serpentine, quartz sand and silica sand.
Morvin was the first person, who introduced anthracite and silica sand in the oily wastewater treatment
[12]. In the experiment, the inner diameter of coalescence bed was 7/8 inch; its height, cross sectional
area and effective volume were 5 inch, 4.17×10-3 inch2 and 1.74×10-3inch3, respectively. The size of
coalescence material was 20-50 mesh. When the influent oil content was 142-164mg/L, the highest
effluent oil content after flowing through the coalescence bed was 6mg/L.
160 Hongliang Zhao and Guoyi Li / Procedia Environmental Sciences 10 (2011) 158 – 162

Chen et al. [10] studied the oil removal performances of anthracite and quartz sand. The diameter of
the reactor used in the experiment was 500mm; the height of the coalescence bed was 1.0m. An oil-water
separator driven by gravity was used behind the coalescences process, with the size of 1.5×0.5×1.0 m.
When the influent oil contents were 1557 and 1296mg/L for anthracite and quartz sand respectively,
effluent oil contents were 110 and 263mg/L after coalescence and separation, with the removal
efficiencies of 92.6% and 79.7%. The effluent after coalescences process by anthracite had higher quality
than that of quartz sand. This situation is mainly ascribed to the lipophilic property of anthracite, oil
particles can easily absorb to its surface.

Table 1. Properties of some common coalescence materials

Density Critical surface tension

Materials Shape 3
Wetting angle Ref.
(kg/m ) (N/m)
Polypropylene Plate 0.91 0.031 7°38ƍ Chen et al., 2002
PVC Regular boundary 1.21 0.039 19°24ƍ Chen et al., 2002
Ceramist Granule 1.50 0.123 72°42ƍ Chen et al., 2002
Quartz sand Granule 2.66 0.102 99°30ƍ Chen et al., 2002
Anthracite Granule 1.60 0.052 13°18ƍ Chen et al., 2002
Serpentine Granule 2.57 — 37°36ƍ Lu et al., 2009
Stainless steel Regular boundary 7.80 0.108 110°5ƍ Chen et al., 2002
Fiberglass Regular boundary 1.8-2.0 0.025 74°42ƍ Li et al., 1997; Wen, 2007

3.2. Artificial coalescence materials

Recently, many artificial coalescence materials, including polypropylene, PVC, styrene-butadiene

rubber, exchange resin, fibre, modified mc nylon, abs engineering plastics, carbon steel, stainless steel
and fibreglass, are used for oil removal. DKQ-25/W, a kind of mutilface hollow plastic ball made of
polypropylene or polyethylene, produced by a plastic plant in Jiangsu (China), was the first successful
coalescence material for oily wastewater treatment in China [8].
Abandoned cation resin was also used for the treatment of oily wastewater from a power plant [6].
When the flow, influent oil content and temperature were kept at 1.25mL/s, 505.05mg/L and 20 ,
respectively; effluent oil content was 97.52 mg/L after the coalescence bed (height of 30mm), with the
average removal efficiency of 80%.
Chen et al. [10] compared the oil removal performances via fibrous coalescer between PVC and
polypropylene. Experiment results showed that although these two coalescer materials had similar surface
properties (Table 1), their oil removal performances were highly different, due to their different spatial
structures.
Yang et al. [13] utilized polypropylene, polystyrene, styrene-butadiene rubber as coalescence materials
to treat artificial oily wastewater. The results showed that polypropylene had a poorer oil removal
performance compared to polystyrene; however, it had the advantages of high treatment capacity, easy to
clean, when treating the wastewater with low oil content. In comparison, polystyrene had the most
remarkable oil removal performance with the highest removal efficiency of 86.32%. But its removal
capacity was relatively small, and its surface usually was blocked by sludge, which could not be easily
removed. Styrene-butadiene rubber had the poorest oil removal performance, with the highest removal
 Hongliang Zhao and Guoyi Li / Procedia Environmental Sciences 10 (2011) 158 – 162 161

efficiency of 71.68%, and its removal capacity was small, its structure may deform when the temperature
changed.
PVC was applied to treat artificial oily wastewater in other literatures [14]. Under the temperature of
60 , coalescence material concentration of 0.6g/mL, hydraulic retention time of 10min, the oil removal
efficiency of the process was more than 60%.

3.3. Chemical modified coalescence materials

Above analysis shows that the surface property of all of the natural coalescence materials and artificial
coalescence materials is simple, the adsorption-desorption requirements for oil removal can not be met
simultaneously [7]. If chemical modification technology is used to improve the surface properties,
homogeneous coalescence materials are transformed to heterogeneous ones, which will contribute to a
higher oil removal performance. For example, sulfonic group/phosphate group and some salts were
introduced into polyamide, polyvinyl alcohol and vinylon; these hydrophilic materials obtained high oil
removal performances [15].
A novel ceramist and the same material after modification were used to treat oily wastewater, their
highest oil removal efficiencies were 80.62% and 76.97%, respectively. When aluminium sulphate was
utilized in the process as coagulant, the highest oil removal efficiencies changed to 73.02 % and 71.68 %
for ceramist and modified ceramist, respectively [16]. In another literature [17], hydrogen-containing
silicone oil and non-benzene environment-friendly paint were used to modify the red-mud porous
ceramist. The contact angles between matrix to water were 138° and 6° after modification, in comparison
with the 25°before modification.

4. Coalescence equipment for oil removal

At present, complete sets of coalescence equipment has emerged, and has been applied for oil removal.
Pan applied the combination processes of oil separation and fibrous coalescer to treat oily wastewater
from a nuclear power station. GJSZ-15B, a kind of coalescence equipment produced by Asia
Environment Holdings Ltd (Jiangsu, China), was used. The effluent quality met the discharge standards
for oil limitation (oil content<5 mg/L) [18].
A set of novel truck-mounted oil-treating devices including flocculation-sedimentation tank, internal
circulating coalescence equipment and multistage filtration beds, invented by Wuhan University of
Technology (Hubei, China), was used to treat oily wastewater from Jianghan Oil Field. Ceramist after
lipophilic modification was used as coalescence material in the coalescence equipment. After about two
months, the removal efficiencies of SS, oil content, and total iron were 99.9%, 78.9%, and 99.8%,
respectively [19, 20].

5. Prospect of fibrous coalescer technology

The fibrous coalescer technology has been greatly developed in recent years, due to its simple device
requirement, low energy consumption, convenient operation, and high removal efficiency of oil. It is
reasonable to consider that its wide application will bring about huge economic and social benefits for oil
fields, harbours, and steel manufacturers. However, information on coalescence equipment and its
application is still limited at present, great attention and deep investigation on the development of
coalescence equipment should be paid in the future.
162 Hongliang Zhao and Guoyi Li / Procedia Environmental Sciences 10 (2011) 158 – 162

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