JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

Water resources are limited in many areas of the world; sometimes, even these limited resources are negligently contaminated. One of the polluting factors of water is oil and its derivatives. Oil absorption using textiles is one of the common ways to separate oil from water. In this study, we used three types of textiles with different properties in order to make the filter. The experiments were performed using three different concentrations of 10, 20 and 30% oil. In this study, three types of BC, PET and PP textiles in the presence of horizontal and vertical drainages were investigated. The PET and PP textiles were made of nonwoven polyester and polypropylene fibers, respectively, and the BC textile was a two-component nonwoven textile of both polyester and polypropylene fibers that was used for the first time. Flow through the textiles was turbulent. Coefficients of flow were calculated using non-Darcy flow relations and the optimization method. The results showed that at low oil concentrations, the oil absorption had an inverse relation with the porosity and turbulent flow coefficients, but at higher concentrations, the effect of these agents was less; instead, the effect of the concentration and the intrinsic ability of the non-woven fibers was greater.  The best performance was related to PP and PET with the horizontal drainage that had 95 and 91 absorption rates, respectively.