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AUSTIN (KXAN) – Oil spills are among the most serious environmental disasters in human history. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill spilled more than two hundred million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico, turning the sea black for years.
“(This oil spill) still has a lasting impact on marine environments,” said Guihua Yu, professor of materials science at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Yu said the Deepwater Horizon oil spill motivated him to find a solution to eliminate oil spills. More than a decade later, he developed new technology to recover oil from the ocean following an oil spill.
The results, published in Nature Sustainability, used giant rollers coated with a special gel that can absorb oil and reject water. Essentially, they work like paint rollers, but instead of spreading paint, they collect oil.
A heater at the top of the roller heats the oil, causing it to fluidize and flow through the screen where it is collected in a reservoir.
“You actually don’t bring water, it’s mostly crude oil more than 99 percent, so it can be reused immediately,” Yu said.
Traditional oil cleansing
According to Yu, oil spills in the past were cleaned up using giant skimmers. “The effectiveness of [the] mechanical skimmers are very limited.
One of the problems was that they collected the water with the oil, meaning it couldn’t be reused. “Actually, you don’t want… viscous oil mixing with the water.”
The new rollers can be attached to vessels of different sizes. Yu said they could be easily scaled up depending on the size of the ship that would pull the rollers.
Laboratory tests revealed that the rollers could operate for hours without losing efficiency. “We view this as if there is no performance degradation.”
Yu said they next plan to expand the experiment and test how the technology behaves in the real world.
Can gels save the world?
This isn’t the first time Yu’s gel experiments have shown they could help solve a global problem. Last year, his team developed a special gel that can extract water from the air in dry places.
“This could enable millions of people without consistent access to clean water to have simple water-producing devices in their homes that they can easily use,” Yu said at the time.
The gel was recently featured in an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the new paper, the team revealed a new device capable of using the gel. The device could produce 3.5 and 7 kilograms of water per kilogram of gel, according to a University of Texas release.
According to UT, the team now plans to work on other versions of the device.
