Treatment of wastewater contaminated with detergents and mineral oils using effective and scalable technology

In this work, effective, cheap and scalable methodology is introduced to treat oily wastewater. The water produced from car-wash processes was utilized as a model because it has various pollutants – oil, lubricants, detergents, solid particles, etc. The results showed that the turbidity and chemical oxygen demand (COD) values dramatically decrease by using the proposed treatment process, which consists of coagulation, flocculation, sand filtration, and oxidation followed by sand as well as activated carbon filtration. Moreover, the operating conditions were optimized. Without adjustment of the pH value of car-wash wastewater, it was found that 200 ppm of ferric chloride, as a coagulant, and 1 ppm of potassium permanganate, as an oxidant, are the optimum doses. The COD and turbidity values of the final treated wastewater were reduced by almost 88 and 100%, respectively. A prototype with 15 L capacity was designed and fabricated to investigate the scaling up and continuity of the proposed treatment strategy. The results were very promising and indicated that the introduced methodology can be industrially applied.