CFC-free and portable oil-in-water testing.
The development of the eracheck oil-in-water tester series by eralytics was an important step for our environment. It helps keeping our earth’s water resources clean by offering high precision oil-in-water measurements. In contrary to other measurement methods it doesn’t compromise environmental protection efforts by using harmful solvents for the extraction of the aqueous sample.
CFC solvents and the ozone layer
Conventional solvents used for spectroscopic oil-in-water analysis are harming earth’s ozone layer. Most of them have been forbidden by the Montreal Protocol. Others were reported as harmful to the UN Ozone Secretariat. Their future remains uncertain.
Alternative methods, like GC or gravimetry use non-harmful solvents, but require intensive maintenance or have limited repeatability.
eralytics oil-in-water testers eracheck eco and eracheck X are free of such drawbacks and still don`t need harming solvents such as freon or tetrachloromethane.
Ecologically safe extraction solvent
eralytics’ oil-in-water testers are the only analyzer on the market that use CFC-free solvents for the extraction of the oil sample that are not harming the ozone layer. At the same time they offer a better precision as known from the withdrawn ASTM D3921 method. You can use cheap and readily available cyclohexane for the sample extraction during oil-in water testing.
Applications
eracheck performs oil-in-water testing for following sample applications
- Discharge water
- Reinjection water
- Upstream oil recovery
- Downstream process water monitoring
eracheck can also be used to measure oil in contaminated soil.
- Tunnel construction
- Waste deposit control
Total petroleum hydrocarbon vs. total oil and grease
When performing oil-in-water testing two parameters are distinguished:
Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon (TPH) is defined as all matter that is extractable from an acidified sample by an cyclic aliphatic hydrocarbon. The extracted sample is filtrated over Florisil® (synthetic magnesium silicate) to remove all polar substances (e.g. vegetable oils). Total Oil and Grease (TOG) on the other hand still contains all polar substances because the sample is directly measured after the extraction without a filtration step.
This filtration step can be performed by a lab technician using manually prepared clean-up column filled with Florisil.
The eracheck series offers the possibility to automatize this filtration step by using cartridges that are plugged into the inlet of the analyzer. The sample is now filtrated automatically before it is pumped into the measurement cell.
