A new material can absorb up to 90 times its own weight in spilled oil, then squeeze it out like a sponge for reuse, making it easier to clean spills. Oil point of hope.
This result is in contrast to most commercial oil absorbing products – adsorbents. Those products are usually single-use, like paper towels, used to wipe away kitchen dirt once and then discarded. Discarded sorbents and oils are usually burned to ashes.
But what if the oil could be recycled and the adsorbent reused? Developed by Seth Darling and colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, New materials appear to do both, reducing waste.
This oil-absorbing sponge is composed of a simple foam made of polyurethane or polyimide plastic, coated with a layer of “oleophilic” silane molecules, which has the best ability to capture oil. Good location. Less chemical suction will render the adsorption function of the sponge useless, while too much chemical suction means the oil will be difficult to release.
In laboratory tests, researchers found that when the right amount of silane is used, the foam can repeatedly absorb and release oil without significant changes in capacity. But to determine whether the material could help tackle large-scale oil spills in seawater, they needed to conduct a particularly large-scale experiment. To do this, the team created a series of square mats using sponge material, totaling approximately 6 square meters. “We made a lot of foam that was put into mesh bags, which are basically laundry bags,” Darling said.
The researchers suspended bags filled with sponge foam from a bridge above a large pond designed specifically to practice emergency oil spill response. They then dragged the sponge foam material behind a pipeline that sprayed crude oil to verify the material’s ability to remove oil from the water. They then placed the sponge on a press to remove the oil and repeated the process, conducting multiple experiments over several days.
The as-yet-unpublished experiment was completed in early December at the Leonardo National Oil Spill Response Research and Renewable Energy Experimental Facility in New Jersey. “The treated foam worked better than our previous untreated foam or commercial adsorbents,” Darling said.
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