Pretreatment of Fuller's earth with nitrogen

Abstract

This paper summarizes experimental findings of the regenerative capability of nitrogen on Fuller's earth. Regenerating new oil from aged oil involves several cycles requiring a large volume of Fuller's earth. The use of large amounts of Fuller's earth is not economically profitable for companies that carry out regenerative operations to service transformer oils and can have environmental implications, since Fuller's earth is usually used to reclaim transformer oil in a one-time batch basis then disposed of. To improve the situation, a new technique to reduce the number of regeneration cycles is proposed. It is shown that Fuller's earth can be improved by purging it with continuous flowing of a fluid, preferably dry nitrogen.