MIT Develops "Paper Towel" For Oil Spills

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."

Comments

Re:Human hair is awesome too...

[Tweenk]

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.

Re:Filtering exhaust fumes?

[Tweenk]

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.

Re:clever

[Kamots]

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.