Desalter Effluent Without Chemicals: How Coalescing Plus CDFU Cuts Oil From 80000 mg/L to Below 50 mg/L

2026-10-08

Desalter draw-off water combines high oil content with heavy emulsification and violent quality swings, which is why chemical demulsification stayed the default for so long. This piece asks what happens when the chemistry is taken out of the loop: a coale

Constructed Wetlands for Small Communities: Bed Grading, Planting and Honest Limits

2026-09-30

Constructed wetlands win on capital and running cost in low-density areas, but only if the gravel grading, plant selection and clogging risk are designed properly. A look at what the bed actually does, what the plants contribute and where the failure mode

Specifying a Biological Aerated Filter: Media, Backwash and the SS Ceiling

2026-09-30

A biological aerated filter drops the secondary clarifier in exchange for a strict influent suspended solids ceiling. This guide covers the media families from BIOSTYR to BIOSMEDI, the loading and backwash numbers that matter, and where phosphorus removal

Heavy Metals in Industrial Wastewater: Where the Toxic Thresholds Actually Sit

2026-09-30

Heavy metal contamination is graded by speciation, not just total concentration. This piece walks through the published no-effect levels for lead, cadmium and nickel, the nickel chemistry that refinery and plating shops create, and why remediation after t

Refinery Circulating Water Oil Leaks: Sizing a Pressure-Type Coalescing Separator

2026-09-30

Heat exchanger leaks push crude and diesel into refinery circulating water at thousands of mg/L, and sand filters answer it with backwash cycles. This covers the coalescence physics, the influent and effluent oil envelope, and the operating parameters of

Highly Emulsified Produced Water: Why More Reagent Stops Working and What Replaces It

2026-09-30

Chemical flooding has made oilfield produced water far harder to de-oil, and the usual answer of adding more demulsifier just grows the sludge bill. This looks at droplet size, the double 5 and double 10 reinjection criteria, and where pure-physical cyclo

Upgrading Biotreated Tailwater: Why Separation Has to Run Ahead of Oxidation

2026-09-30

Biotreated tailwater is hard to polish because residual colloids and oil consume oxidant and foul media. This examines the sequence of cyclonic dissolved-air flotation followed by ozone catalytic oxidation, the removal and B/C figures reported, and what t

The CASS Cycle in One Tank: Selector Zone, Decanting and the Aeration Hardware That Survives

2026-09-30

CASS runs aeration, sedimentation and decanting in a single reactor, which removes the secondary clarifier but puts every design decision into cycle timing. A look at the selector zone, the removal performance reported in early US plants, and why aeration

Aeration Fundamentals and Where BAF Fits: Oxygen Transfer, Pump Sizing and Media Choices

2026-09-30

Aeration is gas transfer, and the engineering question is interfacial area versus energy. This covers bubble and surface aeration, the groundwater treatment cases, what a GLM(B)-series aeration pump delivers, and how BAF turns aeration plus media into a c

Electrodialysis for Desalting: Membrane Selectivity, Energy Use and the Six Loss Mechanisms

2026-09-30

Electrodialysis trades desalination depth for cost, and it recovers metals and acids that reverse osmosis cannot. This covers how ion-exchange membrane selectivity works, what EDR changed about operation, the recovery and energy figures, and the six secon