Metals Removal from Recovered base Oil using Chitosan Biopolymers

Abstract

It was common to use solvent extraction to recover base oil from used lubricants. Although, significant amount of contaminants removal was achieved by using solvent extraction, some problems arised which need to be resolved. The recovered base oil from solvent extraction was still in the darkish color with stink odor and only minimum heavy metals were removed. As an alternative, an adsorption method which used chitosan to remove metals and contaminants was being investigated. This paper presents the application of experimental design on the study of metals removal from the recovered base oil using adsorption process. Four parameters namely temperature, contact time, chitosan grain size and chitosan dosage on the performance of chitosan to adsorb metals were studied. It was found that the most influential parameter effecting the metals removal was the chitosan grain size. The metals removals also greatly depended on the temperature of the process and chitosan dosage. The performance of these parameters will be further investigated.