Industrial cleaning methods of oil sediments (sludge) from crude oil and products storage tanks

This article is written with the aim of investigating the industrial cleaning methods of crude oil and products storage tanks and identifying the most efficient, safe and economical ones. For this perpose, the types of cleaning and recycling methods for oil sludge describe along with their advantages and disadvantages, then three widely used manual, automatic, and robotic methods discusse. The results show that the automatic cleaning system with powerful pumps is the fastest cleaning system, while the robotic method, where the presence of people inside the tank is not required at every stage, is the safest system. In terms of cleaning costs and environmental impact, automatic and robotic systems may be more expensive than manual methods, but due to the closed cleaning cycle, the ability to recover up to 95% of the sludge, income from the sale of recycle materials, they are the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly.