Modelagem da transferência de massa na remoção do óleo da água produzida por flotação em coluna com uso de tensoativos de origem vegetal

摘要

The treatment of oil produced water and its implications are continually under investigationand several questions are related to this subject. In the Northeast Region Brazil, the onshorereservoirs are, in its majority, mature oil fields with high production of water. As thisoil produced water has high levels of oil, it cannot be directly discarded into the environmentbecause it represents a risk for contamination of soil, water, and groundwater, or even maycause harm to living bodies. Currently, polyelectrolytes that promote the coalescence of theoil droplets are used to remove the dispersed oil phase, enhancing the effectiveness of theflotation process. The non-biodegradability and high cost of polyelectrolytes are limitingfactors for its application. On this context, it is necessary to develop studies for the search ofmore environmentally friendly products to apply in the flotation process. In this work it isproposed the modeling of the flotation process, in a glass column, using surfactants derivedfrom vegetal oils to replace the polyelectrolytes, as well as to obtain a model that representsthe experimental data. In addition, it was made a comparative study between the modelsdescribed in the literature and the one developed in this research. The obtained results showedthat the developed model presented high correlation coefficients when fitting the experimentaldata (R2 > 0.98), thus proving its efficiency in modeling the experimental data.