Study on development of Chain brush skimmers to recover spilled low-viscosity oil

摘要

Chain brush skimmers have the brushes mountedon several continuous loop chains and oil is recovered by thebristles of brushes. The brushes are rotated through the oil/waterinterface and oil picked up on the brushes is combed from thebristles into a sump. The skimmers are effective in medium to veryhigh oil viscosities and its performance does not degrade by smalldebris. However, the skimmers are not effective in low viscosity oil.Adhesion mechanism of low viscosity oil (heavy oil A) on thebristles of a brush was studied using hydrophilic and hydrophobicglass beads bed. Amount of oil adsorbed in the bed wasproportional to the entry suction pressure. It was founded that thedevelopment of the entry suction pressure was required and thecapillary diameter should be smaller than 0.392 mm to recoverheavy oil A. The material of brush has no significant effect on theadsorption of heavy oil A which contains functional groups.However, oleophilic brush can be used for all kinds of oil. Whenrecovering oil from an oil-water mixture about 30 to 40 percentwater is also recovered.Recovery rate of low viscosity oil using model brush wascalculated to be 10~12 m~3/hr, almost with same performancereported for recovering medium to high viscosity oil by LBC system.