Pretreatment of Fuller's earth with nitrogen

Janvier Sylvestre N'cho; Issouf Fofana; Abderrahmane Beroual

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03643

Pretreatment of Fuller's earth with nitrogen

Heliyon. 2020 Mar 27;6(3):e03643. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03643. eCollection 2020 Mar.

Authors

Janvier Sylvestre N'cho¹, Issouf Fofana², Abderrahmane Beroual³

Affiliations

¹ Département Génie Électrique et Électronique, Institut National Polytechnique Houphouët Boigny (INP-HB), Yamoussoukro, BP 1093, Côte d'Ivoire.
² Research Chair on the Aging of Power Network Infrastructure (ViAHT), Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 555 Boulevard de l'Université, Chicoutimi, QC G7H 2B1, Canada.
³ Ecole Centrale de Lyon, Université de Lyon, Ampère CNRS UMR 5005, 36 Avenue Guy de Collongue, 69134, Ecully, France.

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.

Keywords: Dielectrics materials; Earth sciences; Electrical insulation; Environmental science; Geochemistry; High voltage engineering; Petroleum engineering; Power transformer.