Development of Energy Efficient Equipment and Technology for Environmentally Friendly Microwave Processing of Oil Sludge

The article proposes the technology of low-temperature microwave separation of oil-water emulsion in the oil sludge processing. Currently used the most common methods for oil sludge processing, with low efficiency and high cost, have a number of other disadvantages, the main ones being the burning of “useful” hydrocarbons, the formation of large amounts of carbon dioxide and other toxic gases, low productivity, inapplicability to high viscosity emulsions. At the present time, one of the promising technologies in the oil and refining industries is considered to be high-frequency and microwave processing of hydrocarbon compounds for stable emulsions separation during primary processing of oil, disposal of petrochemical production wastes. In this case, the separation of the emulsion phases occurs mainly due to heating, which requires the use of powerful (tens of kW) microwave generators, therefore, many of the above disadvantages still remain. To determine the parameters of the microwave field, we proposed the mathematical model that relates the electric field strength to the known dipole moments of coupled charges and electronic, atomic, and relaxation (orientational) polarizability. It is shown, that the required power does not exceed 100 W. The experimental check on the test unit with a video recording of microwave processing with a power of 2 W for 2 minutes showed the adequacy of the proposed model. Thus, the possibility of low-temperature microwave separation of oil-water emulsions is proved in the work. Implementation of the proposed approach will eliminate the disadvantages of existing methods for the separation of oil-water emulsions during oil sludge processing.