ABSTRACT
Oily waters produced in ship operations are one of the essential threats to the marine environment. These wastes find their way to seawater by: discharge of ballast water and cargo tank washing
water, discharge of bilge water, ship disasters and failures, spillage during oil un/loading operations, oil spills from propeller shaft bearings and other
oil-lubricated elements that have contact with water [3,4,7,9,17]. All these sources of pollution have a high content
of oil products, and their occurrence seems to be practically unavoidable. The oil separator NEPTUN shown in Figure 1 purifies bilge water in which oil particles reaching the oil separator filter can have diameters less than 50 ȝm and various oil concentration amounting to 10 000 ppm [4,24,25].
