When the average person thinks about recycling, they focus on household plastics, cans, and waste paper. It’s a pretty basic activity for them, which largely revolves around trash separation and colour-coded bins. But there’s a larger scale involved, one which is essential to industrial operations, and that’s liquid filtration. In manufacturing plants, thousands of litres of liquid get used every day, so it needs to be reused, repurposed, or safely disposed of – sometimes all three, because wastewater gathers toxins during industrial processes.
There are also oil wastes that need to be filtered. They range from cutting fluids, lubricants, and coolants to used vegetable oil, raw biofuel, and food-grade fats. Fuels are filtered to get rid of water droplets, vapour, or organic germs like mould and fungi. These contaminants affect fuel efficiency, and can even damage fuel tanks and other equipment by causing rust. Food-grade oils like vegetable fats have to be cleaned to get rid of solid particles and retain the pure golden colour, both before packaging and after use.
Float all the dirt away
Centrifuges are an excellent cleansing tool because they separate oil from foreign matter by using the density of the contaminant, flinging it against the sides of the vat, or pushing it to the top and depositing clean oil out of the bottom. Here at Interfil, we have two series of oil filters – the Dieselcraft series and our own IC-45 centrifuge series. Dieselcraft mainly filters oil products while our IC-45 is equally effective on water-based and oil-based effluent.
The type of oil filtration equipment you select depends on four main factors – time, volume, end-product, and budget. Dieselcraft has two models – the OC 20 and the OC 50. The difference is in their speed and capacity. OC 20 cleans 210 litres an hour at 3.5 lpm, while the OC 50 can handle double that – 420 litres at 7 lpm. As for our IC-45, the main distinguishing factor is in their cleaning mechanisms. There’s a manual, semi-auto, and full auto model. All three IC-45s can filter oil products at the same rate, but their cleaning system is different.
The right machine for the job
With the manual, you have to stop the machine when you want to clean it. It’s preferred for separating food-grade liquids, such as wastewater from processing potatoes, or fruit pulp from juicers and wineries. It releases clean effluent while sludgy paste gathers on the sides of the steel bowl. You have to switch off the machine and manually scrape the sides of the bowl, taking out the sludge for further processing. This works fine for low volume filtration.
On the other hand, if you want to clean large amounts of – say – coolant or lubricant without stopping the production line, then the fully auto self-clean is better. It has a digital control panel with a touchscreen, so you can programme to continually ‘ingest’ dirty oil and release filtered oil, cleaning itself while it works, and ensuring the production line goes on uninterrupted. Because the IC-45 can handle different liquid densities, you don’t have to adjust the temperature when you’re filtering wastewater or oil-based effluent. You can even use it to separate oil and/or fats from wastewater or to extract glass shards and metallic particles.
To pick the right oil centrifuge for your industrial needs, call Interfil today on 02 9533 4433.
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