Filtering Alcohol

We do a filter medium (a specially formulated grade of Activated carbon).

Please contact satran@dynanet.lk or sisiraa@gmail.com.

A filter, according to my understanding, is a mechanical device that separates materials by phase (solids from liquids or gases, liquids from gases). If I understand correctly, no filter will remove dissolved materials, such as oil from alcohol . You need an active device. Distillation is such, and is not at all difficult, although considerable care must be taken in distilling flammables. Vacuum distillation can reduce the danger significantly, although admittedly at some cost.

Wold cooling reduce oil solubility significantly?

Are there any means of coalescing or polymerizing the oil?

Then the filtering/mechanical separation would be useful.

It may be simpler to use a two stage process, a dirty wash, then a clean wash.

This way the clean wash lasts a lot longer.

When dirty it is transfered to the dirty wash and new solution us used for the clean wash.

automatic car and vehical washers do this a lot. The final rinse water is reused as makeup water for the pre-rinse/ washer area. Without too much difficulty these systems will recycle and reuse about 70-80% of the water requirements.

You will require some sort of physico-chemical separation. A straight filtration will not suffice. Adsorption onto an active surface such as activated carbon may work, but may be more costly than distillation.

I believe you're looking at Reverse Osmosis, or ultrafiltration.

Pall Corporation (you will find their products on GlobalSpec) will provide you with all you need. My hunch is that they will tell you to use a corrosion-resistant system (pipes, filter housing), possibly stainless steel, and a filter element made of microporous PTFE. 3M/Cuno, Millipore, Meissner and others make similar products and you should be able to find a local supplier or distributor in Mexico. The microporous PTFE is a fluoropolymer, similar to Dupont's Teflon(r), that has been compounded to produce very small pores. W.L. Gore and others also produce a similar material but you want a pleated filter element and that's why you should work with Pall or the other filter companies mentioned earlier. The PTFE will easily wet in the mineral spirits (it will not wet so easily in water) and provide superior filtration for your application.