Friend of mine is thinking about building a centrifuge to save a couple of hundred gallons of old hydraulic oil. What do ya'll say? My gut feeling says no, but I'm no expert.
In the navy we had centrifugal lube oil purifiers. Why would be my question, it would be expensive as a one deal. Oil can be cleaned but it is the additives that get depleted.
Agree with alskdjfhg one the additives being lost. Might be better to find someone with a waste oil furnace and sell it to them for about 1/2 the cost of heating fuel. That said from what I read Iran is suppose to be having a slightly used centrifuges they might be selling cheap!:tong
For a couple of hundred gallons..? Not worth the effort, sell it as furnace burning oil. Move along, nothing to see here ............
Agreed. That's what filter carts are for anyway, probably a lot more efficient that a centrifuge for hydraulic oil. Again as Nige sez, not worth messing with.
Thanks guys, your confirming what I was thinking. The guys is pretty determined to do it. Since it's his equipment, and he'd be paying me to build it, he can do what he wants.
As I posted on another thread regarding purifying or selling some contaminated diesel fuel. Multiply how many gallons of fluid you have by the new price/gallon. Do the same using whatever price you can get for the fluid as furnace fuel multiplied by the quantity. The difference between the two numbers is the maximum you can spend on treatment and not lose money on the deal. Don't forget to include the cost of whatever energy (mains power, genset, etc) you plan to use for the process in your calculations. Crunch the numbers yourself and see........t'ain't worth it unless you are into the thousands (or maybe tens of thousands) of gallons.
You also might want t remind him that the additives will also clean out with the dirt. Personally, I wouldn't take the chance on ruining a pump re using old oil.
not worth it . i dont even clean my own hydraulic oil, i burn it in waste oil boiler . i have my own centrifuge same one i used in the navy to clean jp5 to refuel helicopters at sea. i buy home heating oil off home owners that switch to natural gas and i run it threw the fuge. it cleans down to 1/2 micron. i hardly ever change fuel filters !!!. if you had a fleet of equipment that lets say used the same weight and grade of oil and you bought lets say 1000 gals a year then maybe you should invest in a oil polisher cleaner, some have the filters and that's where the expense comes in. the centrifuge has the biggest up front cost but is cheap maintenance in the long run. all this is ( in my opinion only). only additional input i'd add if anyone wanted to improve their hydraulic system is add another filter of a smaller micron that filtered a portion of the returned oil and read the magazine ( machinery lubrication). they get real deep into being perfect about oil and grease.
Is done regularly and will remove water which a filter cart will not. http://www.alfalaval.com/industries/machinery-manufacturing/Fluid-power/Hydraulic-oil-cleaning/#
That the technology exists to remove particles and water from the oil is not the issue. The one question is - How much does the centrifuge cost..?
as heavey metal knows they arn't cheap i have a alfalaval mab105 i'am gonna take a wild stab and say new around 30k for my model??? again wild??? and it seems our hydraulics dont really got hot enough to do too much in the way of evaporation either so water can be a issue. changing is only way. one additive i believe is a moisture absorber.
Water can be removed easily by simply applying vacuum and circulating the oil a bit.