Breaking emulsions to separate oil phase from water phase

[breakingemulsions]

Hello,
My name is Carlos and I work as a technician in a veterinary plant where we manufacture inactivated vaccines. Our vaccines are WO emulsions, with a 7:3 proportion of oil and water respectively. Now we want to treat our residumms from the installation cleanless. These residumms contain 100 L of water and 25 L of stable WO emulsion. I would like to know what is most effective method to break this kind of emulsions completely. We need less than 150 ppm of oil in the resulting water.

Thank you very much for your attention.

 

[nbucska]

What kind of oil ?

<nbucska@pcperipherals.com>

 

[breakingemulsions]

We mix three kind of oils. The major quantity is a liquid parafin, marcol 52, that can be the 90% of the mixture, and the two are vegetable oils, sorbitan monoleate (span 80, 8%) and polisorbate 80 (tween 80, 2%).

 

[TD2K]

Heat and chemicals are commonly used to break emulsions. I'm not familar with what emulsions can be used in this service (I'm assuming for vaccines they would need to be food grade) but companies like DOW, Nalco, Betz all produce emulsion breakers. I'd try talking to them. IF nothing else, they should be able to direct you in the right direction.

Emulsion breakers, in my experience, are trial and error to hit the right product and the right amount but they can be very successful.

A centrifuge is other possible options. I've seen this used to separate a very stable water in oil emulsion and there was essenially no oil in the water.

 

[mrtangent]

One other consideration you may think off depending on your oil types / water is a membrane type unit.

Facet Inernational use this type of unit to clean aircraft fuel from water. Try the web site and talk to a local rep.

 

[birkATO]

I usually use isopropyl alcohol to break emulsions. The ones I work with are silicone emulsions. Heat will sometimes break emulsions that are not very stable to begin with.

 

[redlabel]

how about lowering pH with acid?