Used lubricants collection

In this business case there are two suppliers who provide the lubricants to the Mexican sugar mills. The lubricant is delivered to the sugar mill and collected and recycled by the service providers. The machines in the sugar mill are operated by the user. The basis of payment is the amount of sugar cane milled therefore the unit of charge is based on the function of the used lubricants (Fig. 7). 

The EU legislation, as The Waste Oil Directive [4], requires that the use of collected waste lubricants should be reclaimed as the major priority, rather than be burned as fuel. The withdrawal of the 40/tonne subsidy changed the emphasis towards reclamation and recycling. With modern reclamation plants and a shortage of base stocks as crude oil and fuel prices continue their inexorable rise due to increasing demands this requirement continues to meet commercial demands. There is however a strong possibility that the Waste Oil Directive may be repealed, and the choice of whether to reclaim the oil is expected to revert to individual... 

It is important to consider the total environmental costs and benefits of dealing with used lubricants. Previous sections have indicated that the quality of the re-refined producf is determined by the nature of the feedstock and also by the treatment process. The total amount of energy consumed in the collection... 

A modern re-refining plant producing a top-quality base oil is expensive to construct and is not common, therefore a comprehensive collection and transport system is needed to keep that plant supplied with used lubricant. Local solutions such as fuel use in correctly designed systems, if authorised, obviate the need for large-scale transport systems. 

Used oil disposal trends include waste minimisation such as by reclaiming used fluid on site, as well as recycling of mineral oil lubricants instead of disposing by incineration. The recycling effort involves a system where spent mineral oils are collected then shipped to specialty refineries where the materials are distilled, hydrofinished, and re-refined into fresh base stocks. These re-refined materials are virtually identical to virgin feedstocks. 

Lubricating oil used in intermittent service must show the least possible variation in viscosity with respect to temperature and must be changed at frequent intervals to remove the foreign matter collected during service. The stabiUty of such oil is therefore of less importance than the stabiUty of oil used in continuous service for prolonged periods without renewal. Lubricating oil for continuous service must be extremely stable because the engines in which it is used operate at fairly constant temperature without frequent shutdown. 

In practice, treatment (1) usually involves a contractor collecting a segregated batch of oil, reconditioning and returning it for re-use. A contractor can carry out the simple filtration process, but it is more usually done on-site. Re-refining is the removal of contaminants and oxidation products and previously incorporated additives to recover the lube base stock for new lubricant or other applications. 

An industrial microscope with a long-working distance 20 X objective is used for the collection of the chromatic interference patterns. They are produced by the recombination of the light beams reflected at both the glass/chromium layer and lubricant/steel ball interfaces. The contact is illuminated through the objective using an episcopic microscope illuminator with a fiber optic light source. The secondary beam splitter inserted between the microscope illuminator and an eyepiece tube enables the simultaneous use of a color video camera and a fiber optic spectrometer. 

EC policy is that waste oils from use as lubricants should be recycled or used as fuel as far as possible. Some EC countries have a more regulated organizational framework for collection and... 

Fiber-bed scrubbers are used to control aerosol emissions from chemical, plastics, asphalt, sulfuric acid, and surface coating industries. They are also used to control lubricant mist emission from rotating machinery and mists from storage tanks. Fiber-bed scrubbers are also applied downstream of other control devices to eliminate a visible plume. Despite their potential for high collection efficiency, fiber-bed scrubbers have had only limited commercial acceptance for dust collection because of their tendency to become plugged. 

Semimicro methods of analysis have been extended to the application of such a down to earth problem as the determination of oil in wax by Wiberly and Rather (67). This procedure is certainly no academic development and is at the present time undergoing standardization in the ASTM. It will probably replace the existing macro method. These authors (68) adapted and employed analysis under the microscope to analyze sediments and deposits collected from systems employing petroleum lubricants. The petrographic and binocular microscopes are used for this purpose. 

The imaging data were collected over the spectral range of 1200-2400 nm at 10-nm increments using a Sapphire NIR-CI system (Spectral Dimensions, Inc., Olney, MD, USA). The size of FOV was 13 x 10 mm, each pixel sampling an area of approximately 40 x 40 pm. The concentrations of the active ingredients as reported from the manufacturer s label are 37% acetaminophen, 37% aspirin, and 10% caffeine. The remainder of the tablet mass represents the excipient (binder, disintegrant, and lubricant) materials. Pure acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine samples are obtained in either tablet form or powder compact and are used to obtain reference spectra of pure components. 

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