Cloth Successfully Separates Oil From Gulf Water

Chinobi writes "Di Gao, an assistant professor at the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, has developed a method of separating oil from water within just seconds using a cotton cloth coated in a chemical polymer that makes it both hydrophilic (it bonds with the hydrogen atoms in water) and oleophobic (oil-repelling), making it absolutely perfect for blocking oil and letting water pass through. Gao tested his filter successfully on Gulf Oil water and oil and has an impressive video to demonstrate the results." This is a laboratory demonstration; the technology hasn't been tested at scale.

Comments

Re:Great for filtering, but -

[techno-vampire]

Try squeezing a wet towel, you won't get all the water out.

So what? You don't want to get it all out. All you need to do is get enough out that it's no longer saturated and can absorb more water. A wet towel absorbs water faster than a dry one because you don't have surface tension to worry about, and the same's probably true with oil. Run the saturated cloth through a wringer to press out most of the oil into a containment vessel, then spread it out again to pick up more.