Efficient ventilation for petroleum refinery

Inven­t’s prod­ucts have been pro­vid­ing reli­able aer­a­tion of high­ly sen­si­tive waste­water at an oil refin­ery south of Oslo since 2014. On the west­ern shore of the Oslofjord, more pre­cise­ly in Sla­gen­tan­gen near the town of Töns­berg, the ener­gy com­pa­ny Exxon­Mo­bil has been oper­at­ing a large refin­ery for pro­cess­ing crude oil since 1961. About 6 mil­lion tons of oil are processed here per year.

Nat­u­ral­ly, such an oper­a­tion has its own waste­water treat­ment plant. In 2014, they ordered a TEX-FLEX tex­tile mem­brane aer­a­tion sys­tem for waste­water treat­ment, con­sist­ing of 15 lift-out mod­ules with 12 aer­a­tion ele­ments each. The aer­a­tion sys­tem is a tex­tile mem­brane-based tubu­lar aer­a­tor that pro­duces fine to medi­um bub­ble sizes and is specif­i­cal­ly designed for use in prob­lem­at­ic waste­water. A lift-out mod­ule con­sists of an aer­a­tion grid com­plete with brack­et and steel support.

The grid is in turn assem­bled from pre­fab­ri­cat­ed and stain­less steel pipes, whose open­ings are fit­ted with fine-mesh mem­branes made of insen­si­tive tex­tile fiber. The air is sup­plied via robust hoses. The 15 mod­ules were installed in a ring-shaped waste­water tank with an out­er diam­e­ter of 22.5 m and an inner diam­e­ter of 12.5 m. The tank has a capac­i­ty of 1.5 m and a diam­e­ter of 1.5 m. The tank has a capac­i­ty of about 1,575 cubic meters. The aer­a­tion is required for chem­i­cal treat­ment process­es of organ­ic com­pounds in the waste­water, which are pro­duced dur­ing oil processing.