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Question:
There are over 10,000 acres of land devoted for growing crops like mint, spearmint, dill. They also distill the oil on site. Most of the steam distilled oil is separated by decantation. However up to 5.000 ppm of oil stays occluded in the steam condensate. My guess is some oil droplets are very small in diameter 10 to 15 Microns or so.
Our objective is to recover the essential oil, because it has some very pleasant notes.
Here is some factual information:
The flow rate is 20 to 150 GPM
pH -- 7 to 8
Hardness --- negligible
Alkalinity --- no
Sulfate---- very little
Iron or Copper --- may be 1 ppm or so
TDS --- less than 100
We are hoping that we can do a lab test by dispersing oil in water using a high shearing device and try to separate oil using the appropriate resin. Can you tell us the appropriate resin. We appreciate your guidance.
Answer:
Cation resins make reasonably good coalescing medias. They might try CG8, perhaps in the potassium or calcium form
Question: Do you have any knowledge of ion exchange being used to remove water from alcohols past the azeotrope in water removal from bio-diesel production?
Answer:Dried cation resin (usually in the potassium form) is routinely used to extract water from alcohols past the azeotrope. The original work was done by Dow back in the 50's and 60's, I have some of the original papers, if you need them. they dealt with pure alcohols and cover only the extraction of water from them, a far cry from bio-diesel production.
Early, early on, we got involved with some of the bio-diesel people. Although, the resin worked well to neutralize the excess caustic and adsorb excess water, it was too expensive for them to use on a routine basis.
The problem (as I see it) is that the waste oils used as the starting materials contain an awful lot of water, esters and glycols, and fatty acids. Some of these precipitate out of the solution when caustic is added, but there is enough left (at least in some cases) to cause problems. I tried to find out how much is really present, some suggest it might be under 500 ppm, but I couldn't find anything in cyberspace to support that, only that bio diesel is highly variable due to the starting material used.
Question:
This is municipal water and found after two days of shortage. Any idea why it is BLUE?
Answer:
Ah! The famous miraculous blue water of life. Bottle it up and sell it, perhaps we will become wealthy beyond our wildest dreams.
Seriously, it is copper (copper sulfate and/or copper hydroxide makes the beautiful blue color). Somewhere near there is copper pipe, probably without proper dielectric unions, thus a strong galvanic corrosion cell is converting copper metal to copper ions.
Question:
We are looking to use a dealkalizer and softener. We are concerned about nitrate removal. SIR-100-HP is intended for nitrate removal, can we use this for dealkalizing water? Can I use the standard SBG2 instead?
Answer:
If you are going to dealkalizer, as well as remove nitrates, I would use the standard SBG2. Yes, if they over-run, the nitrates will dump, but this will be well after alkalinity dumps.
SIR-100 will also remove alkalinity but, the capacity is lower. Alkalinity will still dump long before anything else. The resin cost is higher and the salt dose is higher.