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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."
are enjoying rum being brought back aboard ship en masse.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
So, we can now clean up the environment without losing the petrol? That's so good it has to be fattening.
This is the sort of thing which should have made the "top 10 technologies of the next 4 years" list rather than punk-ass "social networks"
Does it absorb other liquids as well? If this absorbent power works as well as advertised for other fluids, I may have to petition MIT to release this fabric in sock-form.
Oh.. umm, so I can uhh.. dry my feet. Yeah, that's it. Feet.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
that is a great idea... but it's only nonpolar things it can absorb. if it's e85 they're transporting, only 15% will be recovered, and that will all be gasoline (the rest'll just get the fishies drunk)
but if it did pick up polar compounds, it would also pick up water
p.s. never eat sodium polyacrylate.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
When we completely run out of oil we will have found the perfect solution to clean up the environment...
Also, by that time the ability to recover the last bits of oil from the oceans from spills in the past will be fought over with tremendous military might, even if it's done from rowing boats.
Now I know why there are so many people in prison, it's to supply our future stock of galley slaves powering the next global war.
MP3 Search Engine
Unless you are constantly and effectively avoiding gas that contains ethanol as an oxidizer, you probably have some problem other than persistent water (so water could be constantly leaking in...). The ethanol will pull the water into the fuel mix and carry it through the engine just fine, so the water should burn off in a tank or two, it shouldn't persist if you are using gas with ethanol in it, and you probably are.
"Dry gas" products are often just ethanol or methanol.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
In fact, the US Coast Guard gets pretty annoyed if you don't have some method of cleaning up spills. From TFA, this stuff is supposed to work "better" - tastes great, less filling, picks up more stuff, won't absorb water. Likely it will cost lots more (bad idea, the stuff we have is reasonably expensive). The reusable but is interesting - I'm not sure how you would get the hydrocarbon out of the fabric without creating more of a mess or environmental issue than you already have. If you CAN do this, you have one leg up on the big boy versions of these products that are used to contain actual oil spills. These get recycled in the dump. AFAIK, it's always been possible to recycle the oil from the commercial booms, just not easy, environmentally friendly (think of the detergent that the spill containment people dump out to break up the heavier oil products) nor economically feasible.
We'll see, if it ever gets out of the lab.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Human hair does a great job of adsorbing oil, is renewable, and reusable. It can also be burned as fuel when you're done with it. 200,000 pounds of it goes into landfills every day. You could have enough to adsorb the entirety of Exxon Valdez by collecting what is produced in this country in a week.... and it would be essentially free.
You kids and your fancy nanowire meshes... ;-)
To reclaim the oil, you have to boil it. Seems like on many scales you would use more energy "wringing out" the paper than you would get from the recovered fuel.
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.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
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.