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Ultrasonic Wave Technology Application as Demulsifier of w/o Emulsion in Crude Oil

Muhammad Alim Rafi1,2, Muhammad Irfan Wibisono1, Luthfiya Naifa Putri2


Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Indonesia,
Depok, 16425
muhammad.alim@ui.ac.id , mohamad.irfan62@ui.ac.id , luthfiya.naifa@ui.ac.id

Crude oil is one of the most important ingredients for human’s life, consist of a mixture
of hydrocarbon complexes with small amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and small amount of
metals such as iron, vanadium, nickel and chromium[1]. High pressure is required from rock
layers to extract and remove the crude oil from earth. Sometimes, the pressure given was not
enough to press crude oil out of the earth, so that steam injection is needed to push crude oil out
with the highest turbulent.
Before crude oil entering the fractionation process, crude oil’s salt contents that is
particularly chlorides of sodium and potassium, must be removed first to avoid salt corrosion
in refinery equipments. Salt removal is used by washing crude oil using fresh water that mixed
into the oil to dissolve the hydrophilic materials. The process of desalting usually involves
addition 1–20% of wash water to the crude oil, mixing to form a W/O emulsion and then
subjecting the emulsion to electrostatic demulsification or hydrocyclone treatment (Goyal et
al., 1993; Varadaraj, 2006).
Water content in oil that caused by steam injection and salt removal must be removed
because it will increase the heat loads that will lower the value of fuel oil and inhibit oil
production process. The oil shipped from wet-crude handling facilities must not contain more
than 0.2% basic sediment and water and 10 pounds of salt per thousand barrels of crude oil [2].
Therefore, a demulsifier is used to break the water emulsion in the crude oil. People often using
using chemical substances as water in oil demulsifier. In the other way, if chemical substance
is used, then the disposal treatment which will have a high cost and take longer times will be
required to prevent the waste from jeopardize the environment. Because of this, we need another
option that can be used as demulsifier, and we will be using high temperature in ultrasonic
wave.

Fig. 1. Sound Frequency Diagram.


source: https://depokinstruments.com/2016/01/17/ultrasonic-sensortransducer/

The original emulsion of water in the crude oil is very stable and difficult be broken,
but can be damaged with high temperature ultrasonic wave. Ultrasonic wave is destructive
because ultrasonic wave produce cavitation which cause the formation of small bubbles that
rapidly implode and release an intense shock wave that produces enormous amounts of heat
energy and a variety of highly active radicals, which can completely destroy adjacent material
and improve crude oil’s yield[3]. The working principle of ultrasonic wave is homogenization
to produce turbulence and cavitation to break the water emulsion in oil. When the standing
wave of the ultrasound spreads in a fluent medium which contains scattered drops, the
displacement effect will happens. This phenomenon is named demulsification[4].
The standing-wave resonator was composed with a tube filled with crude oil, a
piezoelectric transducer and a reflection surface at the bottom of the resonator as shown in Fig.
2. The distance between the transducer surface and the reflection surface was determined
strictly in order to form a standing-wave field in the tube and must be equal to odd times of the
ultrasonic half wavelength. If the distance was not equal to odd times of it, a reverberation
chamber would be formed instead. Hydrophone was used to measure the ultrasonic intensity
and to determine whether the standing-wave profile formed. Tap water and proper dosage
demulsifier were mixed before adding into the crude oil. Thus, an unsteady emulsification was
developed. The salts were extracted from oil phase at the mixing time. Then, the tiny drops
dissolving salts were aggregated into bigger ones by ultrasonic irradiation[5]. When the drop's
density differs from that of the medium, the ultrasound standing wave will push the drop moves
to the wave nodes or antinodes. Then the drops collapse and settle down, thus to obtain the
result of demulsification. When water droplets scattered in the oil, standing wave of the
ultrasound will push the water particles to the wave nodes because the density of water is bigger
than that of the crude oil.

Fig. 2. Model of standing-wave resonator.


(1) Ultrasonic transducer, (2) temperature controller, (3) ultrasonic generator, (4)
thermometer, (5) standing-wave resonator, (6) insulating layer, (7) oscilloscope, (8)
hydrophone and (9) nog.
Source: Application of Ultrasound on Crude Oil Pretreatment (Guoxiang Ye et al., 2008)

The utilization of ultrasonic wave make demulsifying environmental friendly compared


to chemical substance demulsifier, because ultrasonic wave doesn’t generate any waste like
chemical substance did. The required time for ultrasonic wave to demulsify is faster, reducing
some non-productive time and less cost as shown at figure 3.
Fig. 3. The differences of water droplet in crude oil demulsification using chemical
method and ultrasonic sound.
(a) The water droplet distribution in crude oil before demulsification, (b) after the action of
chemical method, (c) after ultrasonic excitation, (d) after the action of the combined method
of ultrasound and chemical demulsifier.
Source: State-of-the-art on the development of ultrasonic equipment and key problems of
ultrasonic oil production technique for EOR in China. (Zhenjun Wang et. al, 2018)

Based on the results, it becomes clear that sonication speed up crude oil demulsification.
Additionally, the higher the acoustic field intensity, the more water was separated. For the
regions with lower acoustic activity, demulsification efficiency was always lower than 55%
even when 15 min of sonication at 100% of amplitude were used. On the other hand, up to 93%
of efficiency was obtained after 15 min of sonication in the most intense region[6]. Based on
this, it was clearly visible that in the higher acoustic intensity. An increase of intensity was
observed by an increase of cavitation in the crude oil which contributed on destabilization of
crude oil emulsion. If settling time was low, the separation efficiency would always be low,
even if the ultrasonic field was in optimal conditions. In fact, the diameter of enlarged water
drops was not large enough to quickly settle in a low settling time[7].

References:
[1] Omics International. Crude Oil. [ONLINE] https://www.omicsonline.org/crude-
oil.php. Accessed on 15 January 2018.
[2] Petrowiki. Oil Demulsification. [ONLINE]
http://petrowiki.org/Oil_demulsification. Accessed on 15 January 2018.
[3] Chusna, Khairul. Fatwatun, Nelly. Pramudono, Bambang. (2013). Pembuatan
Virgin Coconut Oil: Pemecahan Emulsi dengan Metode Ultrasonik. Jurnal Teknologi
Kimia dan Industri, Vol. 2, No. 4: 184-188.
[4] Han, Pingfang. Lu, Xiaoping. Shen, Xuan. Ye, Guoxiang. (2010). Desalting and
dewatering of crude oil in ultrasonic standing wave field. Journal of Petroleum Science and
Engineering 70: 140–144. Institute of Sonochemical Engineering, Nanjing University of
Technology, Nanjing, PR China.
[5] Han, Pingfang. Lu, Xiaoping. Peng, Fei. Shen, Xuan. Wang, Yanru. Ye,
Guoxiang. (2008). Application of ultrasound on crude oil pretreatment. Chemical
Engineering and Processing 47: 2346–2350. Institute of Sonochemical Engineering,
Nanjing University of Technology, Nanjing 210009, PR China.
[6] Pedrottia, Matheus F. Endersb, Michele. Pereirab, Leticia. Meskoc, Marcia.
Floresb, Erico. Bizzib, Cesar A. (2018) Intensification of ultrasonic-assisted crude oil
demulsification based on acoustic field distribution data. Ultrasonics - Sonochemistry 40:
53–59. Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, 97105-900 Santa Maria, RS, Brazil.
[7] Gholam, Reza. (2014). Two-stage ultrasonic irradiation for dehydration and
desalting ofcrude oil: A novel method. Chemical Engineering and Processing 81: 72–78.
Shahid Rajaee-Shiraz Campus, Technical & Vocational University, Tehran, Iran.

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