Patent ID: 8877050

Claim:
An appartus for treating hydrocarbon-laden liquid effluents for implementing a treatment method, the treatment method comprising: conducting the effuents into a treatment vessel, feeding a reversible sorbent with a given particle size into the treatment vessel, the reversible sorbent being configured to desorb a plurality of times and be reused, the reversible sorbent comprising a foamed plastic; mixing the effluents with the reversible sorbent to charge the reversible sorbent with hydrocarbons cotained in the effluents, to obtain hydrocarbon-laden reversible sorbent and treated effluents, evacuating the hydrocarbon-laden reversible sorbent at a top of the treatment vessel, extracting the treated effluents from the treatment vessel, separating the hydrocarbons the hydrocarbon-laden reverisble sorbent coming from the treatment vessel, using the reversible sorbent separted from the hydrocabons and reintroducing it into the treatment vessel, and determining the ability of the reversible sorbent to trap the hydrocarbons before reuse; the apparatus comprising: a treatment vessel to recover the hydrocarbon-laden liquid effluents, a system for feeding the treatment vessel with virgin reversible sorbent, an additional system for feeding the treatment vessel with recycled reversible sorbent, a mixer disposed in the treatment vessel to mix the liquid phase of the effluents and the solid phase of the reversible sorbent designed to trap the hydrocarbons, a means for evacuating the hydrocarbon-laden reversible sorbent at the top of the treatment vessel, a means for bringing the reversible sorbent that trapped the hydrocarbons to a desorption system, a means for extracting the treated liquid effluents at the bottom of the treatment vessel, and means for separate recovery of the hydrocarbons and reversible sorbent coming from the desorption system, wherein the treatment vessel is surmounted by two perforated sloping walls that converge to an essentially central position in which is disposed the evacuation means of a screw conveyor type, whereby the effluents to be treated penetrate the treatment vessel through the perforated walls.