Improvement of the polishing unit for the recovery of base oil**

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MemPore Corp. was founded in 2005 to develop a system that would refine dirty oil into clean, re-usable base oil and is ready to build systems that transform used lubricating oil into valuable clean base oil - 10 liters of used oil yields 7 liters of clean base oil. For the first time, used oil can be purified with minimal pollution, from localized systems, using low energy, and at low capital and operating cost. MemPore's System consists of three automated modules - pre-treatment (to take out water, fuel & glycol); membranes (similar to reverse osmosis of sea water); and final regenerative polishing. MemPore wants to develop a polishing unit that will integrate into its membrane system for cleaning used oil. The proposed innovation is mainly focused on screening various adsorbents and methodologically characterizing them for MemPore's used oil polishing (adsorption) unit. The feed for the polishing unit is the membrane unit's permeate stream while the polishing unit's downstream is the actual base oil and final product. The primary goal of this research and development project is gathering and producing the necessary characteristic data of various adsorbents for MemPore's polishing unit. This data helps MemPore to enhance and optimize the adsorption column in their oil polishing unit. The essential data are the adsorption isotherms of the adsorbents, and the maximum equilibrium capacity of adsorbents for removal of heavy metals and wear components from the feed stream of MemPore's polishing unit. From the preliminary literature review and MemPore's know-how, natural and activated fuller's earth, natural and activated bentonite, aluminosilicate zeolite 13X and bauxite are recommended to begin with. The research on adsorbent materials will start with conducting exhaustive literature and patent review as well as the design of experiments (DOE) for experimentally prescreening the separation performance of adsorbents. The second phase is performing the actual adsorption tests for generating the adsorption kinetics and equilibrium isotherms. The untreated and treated samples will be first studied to determine the time to come to thermodynamic equilibrium. Then they will be used to determine the equilibrium adsorption capacities at several different temperatures. **