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Easy-To-Clean Membrane Separates Oil From Water
ckwu writes: A steel mesh with a novel self-cleaning coating can separate oil and water, easily lifting oil from an oil-water mixture and leaving the water behind. Unlike existing oil-water separation membranes, if the coated mesh gets contaminated with oil, it can be simply rinsed off with water and reused, without needing to be cleaned with detergents. The team was able to use the mesh to lift crude oil from a crude oil-seawater mixture, showcasing the feasibility of oil-spill cleanup. The membrane could also be used to treat oily wastewater and as a protective barrier in industrial sewer outlets to avoid oil discharge.
I bet a lot of people who have contaminated well water thanks to fracking are going to love this!
Okay oil sticks to mesh coated with a phosphorylcholine-based polymer membrane. Sounds not-cheap. Next you wash the oil build-up off with water. This happens because the polymer has an affinity for water. Next...what comes next? Where does the oil-water mixture go? Is it shipped to a facility that can properly treat it or are they simply moving the problem to another location?
Apparently these evil overlords calling themselves scientists aren't following entry 12 of the evil overlord list.
Specifically keeping a 5 year old child on staff to spot these glaringly obvious fatal flaws in their evil schemes.
Good thing though. Virtuous hero AC here can exploit that flaw and save us from their evil oil-seawater separation plot.
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Right, it doesn't make sense unless it's used as a filter rather than as a sponge. Which it is.
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US law requires that all oil collected by vacuum ships be brought to a processing facility, where 100% of all oil must be removed prior to the water being discharged.
During the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were serious delays in the US accepting offers of help from the Netherlands and other nations. Most of them came with a price tag, but the Dutch offered three sets of Koseq Rigid Sweeping Arms for free. Because they were only 98% efficient, and they were initially refused.
However, common sense (and desperation) won out in the end, and we started accepting all the offers for free equipment that came in, including the Dutch offer.
Reference article
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The coating lives water and repels oil. Pull it thru an oil-water mix and the water flows thru the holes but the oil doesn't.
Pull it out and it contains a puddle of oil. Rinse it with a little water and the oil comes right off, ready for reuse.
This isn't that uncommon in these types of filters. What is new is that this works dry. Other filters of this type have to be thoroughly wet before they work. This one is oleophobic when dry as well. So no fancy prep to get it to work.
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Perhaps the temperature of the water? The pressure at which it is applied? There are ways.
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It's like Teflon which nothing sticks to it yet somehow manages to stick onto the pan. The same scientists made this stuff.
If fracking contaminated well water with oil, I'm sure they would. Unfortunately, the claim is that fracking contaminates well water with fracking compounds used by the driller, not the oil. This does them no good at all.
Quite right... the water wells are seldom contaminated with oil. Salty production water, carcinogenic solvents, and as yet mystery fracking chemicals are much more common invaders of the fresh water table due to drilling activities.
Every well drilled for oil/gas exploitation travels through the water table to get to the energy reservoir. There is an industry practice of casing these wells with concrete to below where the water table ends, altruistically protecting the water table from the well.
Consider the millions of producing US wells alone: a fraction of a percent of casing failures would still be a huge number of well contaminations. Add the number of all wells drilled since Titusville in 1896, and factor in the likelihood that the older wells were less concerned with safety.
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You could in theory have boats drag a say 20 foot deep by hundreds of feet long "curtain" of the stuff and make it into a closed loop. Then you slowly compress it by winding it like a clock spring while being careful not to let any out. The oil would get thicker around the top and it's weight would gradually press the cleaner water downwards. You could then "scoop".
Maybe a large square shape with a moving wall would be easier.
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Perhaps it takes a lot less wash water than the amount that is cleaned per cycle. Typical of many filtering systems.
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Yeah, won't someone think of saving all that potable seawater. Wait...what?
> if the coated mesh gets contaminated with oil
If I filter oil, the mesh gets oily. What's the reason for the 'if'?
Aparently you have no idea what a filter is. Just reverse the flow and all the filtered material comes back out.
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But they are getting oil out of this deal, and they love oil!
Wasn't this necessity already solved by a competition a few years back? There was an X-prize competition where several groups tested methods of removing oil from seawater. The winner by a large margin (industry standard was 1,100 gallons per minute, goal of competition was 2,500 gpm, they achieved almost twice that) was a simple concept of large rotating grooved disks of plastic, the oil would adhere to the plastic long enough to be scraped off and diverted to a holding tank. It removed far more oil than the competition required, was dirt cheap to build and simple to keep up and running.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141481055/revolutionary-oil-skimmer-nets-1-million-x-prize
Something for me to skim oil off of my soup with?