The heart of the system is the specially designed corrugated plate pack in which the plates are set between 15 and 20mm apart. Small oil droplets therefore have only a short distance to rise before they join other droplets to form a buoyant film on the underside of the plate. The complete pack is inclined in the separator, encouraging the separated oils to rise readily to the surface where they are recovered completely automatically by factory preset weirs. No water is skimmed in this operation.

Drizit designs its separators to recover droplets as small as 20-40 microns in size and to reduce oil discharge levels to very low ppm's (parts per million).