[John3]

We have oil skimmers that remove unwanted oil from our water based coolant sumps. But, thanks to a clueless employee I now have the opposite problem.

Our Tsugami Swiss Lathe holds 45 gallons of cutting oil (Mobil-Met 404). Yesterday when I started the machine up, the coolant oil came out milky looking. Some investigation revealed a "helpful" soul put 5 gallons of waterbased coolant in the machine!$#&!!*&#$!

Short of throwing out all the oil and the employee, does anyone have any suggestions on how to get 5 gallons of well dispersed water out of 45 gallons of expensive oil?

Heat? Inline filter? Freezing?

John

[Freddy4]

If the coolant came out milky why don't you run it out until the mobil - met 404 comes out and that should be it. I am assuming that the mobil oil is floating on top of the water based coolant.
Freddy4

[jetski]

I have found a company in Fishers Indiana that is called Hypro. All they do is filter oil and get contaminants out of it. I would think there would be a way to heat, 212 deg will turn the water to steam and leave the oil. But will that temp harm the oil? Hypro will have some suggestions. I do not have their number but I am sure they have a web site. They build machines to filter oil. They will have a suggestion.

[Geof]

Heating it will likely help the water separate, freezing is not likely to work because the frozen water will just stay trapped in the now very viscous oil.

You could try an experiment with a small volume and see what happens.

Also, even though it sounds a bit strange, adding more water may help it separate better. What you are doing by adding more water is changing it away from separating water from oil into oil from water; again heating could help.

You could really heat it and boil the water off but you will probably also boil off volatile components in the oil so it may not work correctly afterwards.

And having written all this I think you should toss it, thoroughly flush the machine a fill with new oil. There are two reasons I have this opinion;

You are going to spend a lot of time whatever you do and the machine is going to be down all this time; better to cut your losses and get the machine back making money.

Even if you do appear to have removed all the water by some method you do not know what has happened to the waterbased coolant that was in the water. This is an oil which contains emulsifiers so it will mix with water; but it doesn't really mix it is merely suspended as fine droplets of coolant dispersed in the water. However, oil does mix completely with oil so now at least some of your coolant has dissolved into the oil and you will never separate these. This means you have no idea whether the oil will still perform the same even thoug the water has been removed. This mixture of oils over a period of time might create a sludge which clogs things, you have no way of knowing whether this will or will not happen. As I say; toss it, clean and refill.

[John3]

I have found a company in Fishers Indiana that is called Hypro. All they do is filter oil and get contaminants out of it. I would think there would be a way to heat, 212 deg will turn the water to steam and leave the oil. But will that temp harm the oil? Hypro will have some suggestions. I do not have their number but I am sure they have a web site. They build machines to filter oil. They will have a suggestion.

Thanks for the tip, I did find their website. Its www.filterelement.com. I will call them but I am not hopeful. Their water removal page says 'removes a small amount of water from oil". I'm thinking that 5 gallons is more than as small amount.

John

[rustamd]

Thanks for the tip, I did find their website. Its www.filterelement.com. I will call them but I am not hopeful. Their water removal page says 'removes a small amount of water from oil". I'm thinking that 5 gallons is more than as small amount.

John

you can fix that by adding more oil But wouldnt skimmer work, you would just need to remove good oil, not waste from water? I dont know much about them, just wondering