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MIT Develops "Paper Towel" For Oil Spills

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the cleanup-on-ocean-three dept.

TheUnknownCoder writes "MIT scientists have created a Nanowire mesh that can selectively absorb hydrophobic (oil-like) liquids from water up to 20 times its weight. The membrane can be recycled many times for future use, and the oil itself can also be recovered. There's even a video of it in action, removing gasoline from water."

7 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Best part about this? by Vectronic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    - Redundant.

    But, I was hoping the video would show them light the mysterious blue gasoline after.

    If it can "recover" gasoline and be instantaniously reuse it... thats very impressive, especially if there are liquids that can reduce, or eliminate the combustability of liquids while mixed with it, and then use the nano-fabric to seperate them and use either for an purpose. Gasoline tanks, airplanes, etc. not to mention many other uses.

  2. Filtering exhaust fumes? by mikael · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Could this be used to filter car and big-truck exhaust fumes?

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    1. Re:Filtering exhaust fumes? by Tweenk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There are two problems:
      1. The exhaust fumes would have to be precooled. Otherwise, any absorbed hydrocarbons would be desorbed right away due to high temperature.
      2. Reactive species of nitrogen present in exhaust fumes (NO, NO2, etc.) would oxidize the nanowires, so you would have to have a catalytic converter somewhere before them in the exhaust path to remove them, and the cooling phase would have to occur between the converter and the nanowire absorber (platinum only works in high temperatures).

      Since the converter does the same job already (by catalyzing the oxidation of unburnt hydrocarbons in excess oxygen), I think this would be redundant. Additionally, I suppose the nanowires would only remove aerosols and not gaseous hydrocarbons, so the standard platinum converter may actually be more efficient at reducing HC emissions than nanowires.

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  3. Mining Polluted Waterways by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd love to see someone use these materials to filter regular polluted water in our waterways (after a regular filter to keep living creatures out) to both clean the water and recover usable chemicals for fuel.

    And someday someone's going to figure out how to cheaply and easily mine our landfills for all that plastic we've buried for nearly a century. When the cheap oil's gone soon, that's going to be a reasonable alternative if we have the tech.

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  4. Re:hydrophobic liquids by Drakonik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't they boil crude oil to separate gasoline from diesel from plastic-grade crude, and so on? I think (assuming that the material is heat-resistant enough) we could just throw a big pile of it into the separator tanks and boil it out.

    It's possible that I misunderstand the process, of course. Is it just not that simple?

  5. Re:Human hair is awesome too... by Tweenk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It can also be burned as fuel when you're done with it. Hair contains about 5% of sulfur. Burning large amounts of hair wouldn't be a very good idea, unless you like inhaling sulfur oxides.
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    Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
  6. Re:clever by Kamots · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think the clever part about this is that you can heat up these new pads, boil the oil off... let it condense elsewhere...

    And then you've got reclaimed oil and a pad that's ready to go again.