Discuss the pure dry waste oil recovery system on board the ship.

What are its features and benefits? Discuss how the waste oil recovery is accomplished.

Introduction
Pure dry waste oil recovery system is one of the latest technologies. It enables
ship owners to gain considerable saving by using recovered oil in the diesel
engines or boilers.

When using this technology to process waste oil, no liquid is left. Separated fuel
of ISO 8217 quality is returned to the bunker tank, while all of the water is sent to
the bilge holding tank for further treatment. What remains are 5-10 kg per day of
super-dry solid sludge, which are landed ashore as dry waste or incinerated.

Pure Dry system incorporates two waste oil tanks; one for fuel oil and one for
lube oil residues, and the system separates the contents into
-reusable fuel oil which is returned to the bunker tanks,
-water, which is dealt with as bilge water, and
-dry waste solids that need to be safely stored and disposed to shore reception
facility.

On this context, the product description for Alfa Laval Tumba AB SE-147 80
Tumba, Sweden (http://ec.europa.eu) states that:

Pure Dry system efficiently eliminates problems related to disposal of oily waste.
The Pure Dry principle has proven to be a reliable, effective method for the
continuous recovery of fuel in diesel engine installations. It also provides effective
pre-treatment of oily waste before it is pumped to the bilge water system. The
Pure Dry system operates at flow rates of up to 500 liters per hour and separates
waste oils into:
Fuel oil containing less than 5% water
Water containing less than 1000ppm oil
Super-dry solids to be landed ashore as dry waste; typically 5-15 kg/24 h

Environmental benefits
Up to 2% reduction in fuel consumption by recovering fuel oil from waste oil.
 A reduction in carbon dioxide footprint as waste fuel recovery would mean a
reduction in amount of fresh oil being used and hence a reduction in carbon
dioxide emission.
99% reduction in oily waste volumes - the system removes the maximum
amount of water from waste oil, and forwards it to the bilge system, thus
eliminating oily waste.
Reduction of holding tank volumes for waste oil and waste water directly
translates into an increase in the ships cargo capacity.

Sources of recoverable fuel

Automatic back-flushing fuel oil filters
Fuel settling and service tank drains.
Fuel injection pumps leakages.
Boiler burner leakages
Drip trays under fuel transfer pumps, etc
Pipe leakages
Fuel spill incidents
Fuel oil purifiers overflow.

A condition for recovery of fuel oil is that waste fuel oil collected from the sources
listed above is segregated in a separate tank from other drains and leakages, such
as lube oil, hydraulic oils, etc. In most cases, a single Pure Dry system has
sufficient capacity to handle the waste oil produced from a diesel engine
installation on board a ship. In some cases for the largest marine engines or in
multi engine power plants it may be required to install more than one Pure Dry
for fuel recovery.

Process operating principle

There is a positive displacement induction motor driven feed pump operating at a
constant speed and a constant flow which directs the waste oil to the system. The
unprocessed liquid then is led into a pre-heater where the temperature of the
unprocessed liquid is raise to the desired feed temperature of 95C for optimum
separation efficiency,. After the separation the water is then transferred either to
the ships bilge water treatment system for further processing to ensure that it
meets IMO Annex 1 standards for overboard discharge, or back to the waste oil
tank, according to the process conditions. To enhance performance in the
presence of stable emulsions, a demulsifier dosing unit is fitted before the
pumping stage in order to demulsify the mixture before it goes into the separator.
The whole process is completely automated and requires little user intervention.

Conclusion
The Pure Dry technology is full of benefits. On one hand there is fuel saving, on
the other hand, there is minimum sludge retention by using this method of waste
management. This means that there is no more need to call barges for discharing
sludge to shore facilities.