What is Mineral Oil?

This product is a mixture of refined liquid hydrocarbons obtained from petroleum, mainly a mixture of saturated naphthenes and paraffins. Crude crude oil is often distilled under reduced pressure, solvent extraction and dewaxing, and hydrorefined to obtain ^[1] .

Mineral oil is a colorless translucent oily liquid with no or almost no fluorescence. It is odorless and tasteless when cold. It has a slight petroleum odor when heated. It is insoluble in water and ethanol, soluble in volatile oils, and miscible in most non-volatile oils. Light, heat, acid, etc. are stable, but long time exposure to light and heat will slowly oxidize ^[1]

For manufacturing

Allowable daily intake

Mineral oils, as complex hydrocarbons, mainly include two types of straight-chain, branched-chain alkanes and alkyl-substituted cycloalkanes (MOSH) and alkyl-substituted aromatic hydrocarbons (MOAH). In addition, they also contain a very small amount of non-alkyl-substituted Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and sulfur- and nitrogen-containing compounds. The cumulative amount of MOH that is taken into the human body through diet is the largest in the human body, and the sites with the highest MOH content are the lymph nodes and the spleen. MOSH has low to medium toxicity. If long-term consumption of food contaminated with MOSH, it will cause great damage to human health. In general, food-grade white oil (liquid paraffin) is basically all MOSH, while industrial-grade mineral oil contains very high levels of MOH and 15% to 35% MOAH. ^[3]

During the process of planting, harvesting, drying, and finally processing food materials, they will come into contact with soil or ground mineral oil, diesel oil, engine oil, incompletely burned gasoline, and polluted air. Contamination of mineral oil. The specific sources of pollution are mainly the following six aspects: ^[3]

Mineral oil contains many harmful substances to the human body, such as heavy metals, aromatic hydrocarbons, and long-chain alkanes, which can cause harm to the organism. It is difficult for various organisms to decompose the mineral oil, causing the toxic mineral oil to be enriched in the organism. It eventually reaches the human body through the food chain, and the human gastrointestinal tract is difficult to absorb mineral oil. Once the mineral oil content exceeds the standard for a long time or contains mineral oil Foods can cause great obstacles to the human digestive system, such as vomiting, diarrhea, and coma after long-term consumption of foods contaminated with mineral oil. What's more serious is that the human body accidentally consumes mineral oil for industrial use, which will produce acute poisoning and chronic poisoning, which will destroy individual cells in the human body and cause damage to the nervous system. In addition, it will damage the human respiratory system, reduce the number of red blood cells in the blood, and cause respiratory failure. Therefore, people must pay attention to a safe diet in daily foods to ensure that there is no or little mineral oil intake. ^[3]

The domestic detection methods for mineral oil are mainly divided into qualitative detection methods and quantitative detection methods. Among them, the qualitative detection method can only detect whether the sample contains mineral oil, the detection steps are relatively simple, the price is relatively low, and the requirements for the test equipment and conditions are relatively low. The quantitative detection method can not only detect whether the food contains mineral oil, but also the content of the mineral oil contained in it, but the detection steps are relatively complicated and the price is relatively expensive, and the test equipment and conditions are higher. ^[3]

As a mineral source pesticide, the insecticidal mechanism of mineral oil is physical suffocation and behavior change, and the bactericidal mechanism is interference. ^[4]

From the insecticidal action mechanism of mineral oil, it can be seen that compared with chemically synthesized pesticides, its insecticidal action has the following characteristics: ^[4]

The relationship between the physical and chemical properties of mineral oil and agricultural production. Traditionally, mineral oil refers to a liquid hydrocarbon mixture refined from petroleum through appropriate processes. Its basic physical and chemical properties generally include: composition, distillation range, density, kinematic viscosity, flash point. , Impurity content, etc. In agricultural production, various performance indicators of mineral oil have an impact on crops from different aspects. ^[4]

With the development of petrochemical production technology, the production of targeted narrow fraction products through precision distillation technology has been achieved; through appropriate hydrogenation technology to replace the traditional sulfonation process, the technology of deep removal of sulfur, nitrogen, aromatics and other toxic substances has matured. Therefore, it is completely possible for mineral oil to achieve biosafety and meet the requirements of organic food production standards. ^[4]

There are currently two widely used waste mineral oil recovery technologies abroad, one is catalytic hydrogenation technology, and the other is solvent refining combined technology. Both of these technologies have high recovery efficiency, good environmental protection effect, and recovery rate. Very high characteristics, but due to the high technical requirements for the application of these two technologies, and the large amount of equipment required, large capital investment requirements, and large dependence on the stability of waste mineral oil sources, Applications in the oil recycling industry are not widespread. Due to the insufficient concentration of waste mineral oil-producing enterprises in China's petrochemical and metal production units, there is no centralized source of waste mineral oil. Collecting and transporting operations will consume a lot of costs, and some provinces still have more Small-scale illegal waste mineral oil collection enterprises have impacted the stability of the normal order of the waste mineral oil recycling market. These illegal enterprises will not only raise prices to seize waste mineral oil resources, but also conduct vicious competition to crack down on regular enterprises and Waste mineral oil recycling industry brings chaos. At present, there are mainly three types of technologies commonly used in waste mineral oil recycling companies: atmospheric distillation technology, vacuum distillation technology and simple pretreatment technology. ^[5]

Simple pretreatment technology for mineral oil waste mineral oil

The technical requirements of this method are simple, only for those mineral waste oils used in device lubrication and production equipment cleaning. This is because the operating conditions for equipment cleaning and device lubrication are generally closed, effective pollution is small, and pollutants in waste oil Usually some mechanical wear waste residue and moisture, after simple filtering and decolorization and dehydration operations, you can get poor quality base mineral oil. Some waste mineral oil recovery production units will also mix better quality mineral oil and solvent. In the treated waste oil, the quality of recycled oil is improved. ^[5]

Mineral oil waste mineral oil atmospheric distillation

The process of applying this technology is to first heat the waste mineral oil to a certain temperature, vaporize its organic components into steam, and then enter the condensation equipment to cool the production of base oil under the role of the condensation equipment. This is also common in the waste mineral oil treatment industry. Applied method. ^[5]

Mineral oil waste mineral oil vacuum distillation

Distillation technology is a technology widely used in oil production. It can accurately cut the components in oil products. In the waste mineral oil recycling industry, the application of vacuum distillation technology can recover more than half of the oil. . The vacuum distillation process first uses an additive to neutralize the acidic substances in the waste mineral oil, and filters out ash and metal slag. After that, the water and light components in the waste mineral oil such as light oil are evaporated by vacuum evaporation. After separation, other raw materials are sent to a vacuum distillation column for separation operation. The temperature of the vacuum distillation column decreases from bottom to top, and it is cut into several lubricating oil base oil components according to the distillation range of the oil product. ^[5]