Dynamic Separation System Improves Uptime and Product Quality Plus Savings on Resources

Today’s manufacturers and fabricators are now realizing cost savings using a new and highly efficient technology — dynamic oil water separation — to continuously remove process oils and even minute contaminants from an aqueous cleaning solution, while being used, with no process interruptions.

In high-volume production operations such as Bodycote’s, the world's largest provider of metallurgical testing and thermal processing service, downtime or quality rejects resulting from inferior separation methods is costly and causes weekly or even daily maintenance problems such as dirty bath water and frequent bath changes. Such problems can lead to scrapped products as well as falling behind JIT demands.

Blane Timmerman of Bodycote explains that in the past his heat-treating process tended to create a rag layer between the oil and water in the dunk/spray washer. “We would get this nasty in-between layer that was an emulsification of water in oil,” he says. “It didn’t completely separate into either the oil or water. It tended to stay right there in the middle, sandwiched between the water and oil. And that hindered oil separation because the emulsified layer would roll down the skimmer rope or plate back into the water and stay there.” The result was more frequent bath changes and downtime.

“I had tried just about every oil-water separation technology,” says Timmerman, “Our operation and our customers are very demanding, and conventional oil separators just haven’t met our needs.”

After using a variety of oil water separation devices, including disks, belts, mops and plates, Timmerman heard of a new dynamic separator technology, the Suparator, which removes virtually all oil, the oily emulsion, and oil-suspended particulates from aqueous media, even at very low concentrations.

This unique technology removes oil so effectively, that lots of dirt and other foreign matter are separated with the oil. Elimination of these contaminants warrants a much cleaner process and cleaner parts, translating to better quality products and less rejects.

Dynamic separation also extends bath life, providing significant savings in detergents. Bath changes are greatly reduced, vast quantities of water are conserved, oils are more efficiently recycled and far smaller volumes of cleaners and coolants have to be disposed of.

The fact that the Suparator system removes oil-entrained solids and particulates means that they do not have time to settle through the oil into the water. This, too, significantly improves product quality, maintenance intervals and associated downtime.

In addition, the dynamic oil-water separation technology saves Timmerman’s Bodycote operation on oil disposal costs:

“We used to have to pay a penalty to dispose of oil with high water content,” says Timmerman “In 2002, relatively ‘dry’ oil disposal cost was approximately 15 cents a gallon. But because of the water drag-out of our old oil separators, we were getting wet oil. If the oil had more than 10 percent water, which was often the case, we had to pay around $1.05 per gallon - a very significant difference.” In 2007 dollars that penalty price for wet oil would be much higher.

Today, in addition to eliminating the rag (emulsified) layer and the water drag-out, the dynamic technology has enabled Timmerman’s operation cut oil disposal costs as well as increasing the reuse of our bath water several times over, Timmerman says.

For more information, contact Aqueous Recovery Resources, Inc.’s (ARR) oil-water separation systems.

Kimberly Kaplan
Aqueous Recovery Resources
kbb@suparator.com
www.suparator.com
914-241-2827