Separation of Water‐in‐Oil Emulsions Using Glass Fiber Media Augmented with Polymer Nanofibers

Water‐in‐oil emulsion separations are important to the petrochemical industry for product quality, safety, environmental, and economic reasons. Glass fiber filter media are often used to remove water droplets out of water‐in‐oil emulsions. The experimental results in this work show that 1% by mass of polyamide nanofibers with diameters of about 150 nm added to conventional micron‐sized glass fiber filter media improves the separation efficiency of the filter media from 71 to 84%. The addition of similar amounts of micron‐sized polyamide fibers to the glass fiber media do not improve filter capture efficiency.

Keywords:

• Coalescence
• filtration
• filter media
• nanofiber
• electrospin

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Coalescence Filtration Nanomaterials Consortium: Ahlstrom Paper Group, Donaldson Company, Fleetguard, Hollingsworth and Vose, and Parker Hannifin. This work was also supported by the Produced Water Seminar. This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation grants CTS‐0310429 and DMI‐0403835.