Deep dewatering of refinery oily sludge by Fenton oxidation and its potential influence on the upgrading of oil phase

Highly efficient dewatering is essential to the reduction and reclamation disposal of oily sludge, which is a waste from the extraction, transportation, and refining of crude oil. How to effectively break the water/oil emulsion is a paramount challenge for dewatering of oily sludge. In this work, a Fenton oxidation approach was adopted for the dewatering of oily sludge. The results show that the oxidizing free radicals originated from Fenton agent effectively tailored the native petroleum hydrocarbon compounds into smaller organic molecules, hence destructing the colloidal structure of oily sludge and decreasing the viscosity as well. Meanwhile, the zeta potential of oily sludge was increased, implying the decrease of repulsive electrostatic force to realize easy coalescence of water droplets. Thus, the steric and electrostatic barriers which restrained the coalescence of dispersed water droplets in water/oil emulsion were removed. With these advantages, the Fenton oxidation approach derived the significant decrease of water content, in which 0.294 kg water was removed from per kilogram oily sludge under the optimal operation condition (i.e., pH value of 3, solid-liquid ratio of 1:10, Fe2+ concentration of 0.4 g/L and H2O2/Fe2+ ratio of 10:1, and reaction temperature of 50 degrees C). In addition, the quality of oil phase was upgraded after Fenton oxidation treatment accompanying with the degradation of native organic substances in oily sludge, and the heating value of oily sludge was increased from 8680 to 9260 kJ center dot kg(-1), which would facilitate to the subsequent thermal conversion like pyrolysis or incineration. Such results demonstrate that the Fenton oxidation approach is efficient for the dewatering as well as the upgrading of oily sludge.