OIL & WATER SEPARATORS
Chapter 4
1.0 INTRODUCTION
A goal of any efficient mechanical recovery operation is to minimize the amount of water that is collected, stored, and sent to disposal. One common method of accomplishing this is to decant water from the mixture while it is held in a temporary storage device. Appendix D describes recent research in this area. Another method is to use oil/water separators to try and resolve recovered fluids into oil and water phases while they are being pumped.
The use of oil/water separators in oil spill response represents a large area of neglected technology, but there are signs that this situation is changing. This section of the World Catalog contains the results of comprehensive tests of separators suitable for oil spill response. This is important because there have been few tests of separators to be used for this purpose. Lack of adequate storage space can be an important limitation in a large-scale spill response, and the use of separators offers one potential solution to the problem.
(Thirteen pages of text and references followed by one page of separator data listings)
