Water and Wastewater.com Help Forums - Getting grease out of a process

Todd C

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Getting grease out of a process
Feb 22^nd, 2012, 2:42pm

I have a 200,000 gallon tank that accepts grease and septage. We got slugged with a lime water that caused the greased to break down (from the normal top crust) and get mixed into the water. We have a belt press but the grease is blinding the belt. We have added Diatomaceous Earth in the past to thicken the grease and get it to dewater on the belt filter press but we are not having luck this time.

Does anybody have another way to get the grease out of the system (some kind of thickening agent) that you have used or that we might try? Tough problem I know.

Thanks in advance.

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Jeff Naumann

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Re: Getting grease out of a process
Reply #1 - Feb 22^nd, 2012, 3:36pm

What do you plan to do with the grease?

What do you do with the waste when the grease is removed?

Grease does not "thicken," so adding chemicals to dense grease will not help, except for chemicals that might be used separate the grease from water. Grease, or fat, is incompressible in its pure form.

Normally, easily-floatable grease would just be skimmed off the surface of the tank.

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David S. Senior Member Offline I have nothing clever to say here. Posts: 373 Gender: Company or Organization: Environmental Express	Re: Getting grease out of a process Reply #2 - Feb 22^nd, 2012, 4:43pm When you say you 'got slugged with lime water' does that mean you had a large volume of high pH waste come in? If so you may have made some soaps (saponification). I don't have any good suggestions for what to do about it, just throwing out some ideas as to what it may have done to you.
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Rajesh Kumar YaBB Newbies Offline New and Interested !! Posts: 17 Dubai Gender: Company or Organization: DM	Re: Getting grease out of a process Reply #3 - Feb 22^nd, 2012, 5:17pm As Jeff mentioned, grease is normally skimmed off the surface of tanks. you might want to install a grease trap upstream to facilitate this. In conventional plants, the fat skimmed off is fed to the digesters.
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sobisch God Member Offline Posts: 1777 Gender: Company or Organization: L.U.M. GmbH	Re: Getting grease out of a process Reply #4 - Feb 23^rd, 2012, 2:38am You may try to lower the pH into the acidic range or try to add even more lime. For the belt, you might have to clean it with pressurized or hot water. Kind regards T. Sobisch
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