Coupling magnetic particles with flocculants to enhance demulsification and separation of waste cutting emulsion for engineering applications

Magnetic particles were coupled with a flocculant to enhance the demulsification and separation of waste cutting emulsions. The optimal magnetic particle size and critical magnetic field conditions were investigated to achieve large-scale engineering application of magnetic demulsification separation for waste cutting emulsion treatment. The micro-scale magnetic particles were found to show comparable effects to nano-scale magnetic particles on enhancing the demulsification and separation of cutting emulsions, which are beneficial for broadening the selectivity of low-cost magnetic particles. The critical magnetic separation region was determined to be an area 40 mm from the magnetic field source. Compared to the flocculant demulsification, the magnetic demulsification separation exhibited a significant advantage in accelerating flocs–water separation by decreasing the separation time of flocs from 180–240 min to less than 15 min, compressing the flocs by reducing the floc volume ratio from 60%–90% to lower than 20%, and showing excellent adaptability to the variable properties of waste cutting emulsions. Coupled with the design of the magnetic disk separator, continuous demulsification separation of the waste cutting emulsion was achieved at 1.0 t/hr for at least 10 hr to obtain clear effluent with 81% chemical oxygen demand removal and 89% turbidity reduction. This study demonstrates the feasibility of applying magnetic demulsification separation to large-scale continuous treatment of waste emulsion. Moreover, it addresses the flocs–water separation problems that occur in practical flocculant demulsification engineering applications.     

Magnetic polyamidoamine dendrimers for magnetic separation and sensitive determination of organochlorine pesticides from water samples by high-performance liquid chromatography

Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) have received much attention due to their toxicity. Reliable methods to monitor their residues in the environment are needed. Here, magnetic polyamidoamine dendrimers were prepared by co-precipitation, Michael addition, and amidation. The magnetic polyamidoamine dendrimers demonstrated good adsorption ability for OCPs—this feature was utilized to construct a sensitive tool for monitoring OCPs in water samples. The proposed method provided remarkable linearity from 0.1 to 500 μg/L and satisfactory limits of detection from 0.012 to 0.029 μg/L. The spiked recoveries of the four target analytes were 91.8%?103.5% with relative standard deviations less than 4.5%. The magnetic materials had good reusability. The results indicated that the resulting method was an efficient, easy, rapid, economical, and eco-friendly tool for monitoring OCPs in aqueous samples.