The cheap, easily made substance to clean an oil spill or your kitchen
Researchers have stumbled onto a cheap, safe way to clean up oil spills that they hope could also double as a way to clean your kitchen.
Researchers from QUT have developed a foam that rapidly absorbs oil, which could then be quickly produced and sprayed onto the area of a spill.
Associate Professor Jingsan Xu from QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty said the research team had created the foam while investigating the properties of aluminium oxide.
“This material is made of stearic acid and aluminium oxide, which is low cost and non toxic,” Professor Xu said.
“The material is extremely hydrophobic, which means it doesn’t like water, it likes oil, so you can use it to absorb oil from water.”
Professor Xu said the team hadn’t been trying to specifically develop a cleanup method for oil spills, but they were astonished by the material’s properties.
“We sort of came up with it by accident; we didn’t intend to mix these two materials, but when we did we found they had these chemical properties which meant it could be processed into a foam which could remove oil,” he said.
Current methods of cleaning up large-scale oil spills usually involve boom-arms, which trap the oil in an area, allowing it to be physically scooped out.
Cleanup crews sometimes try to burn off the oil once it is contained; however, this has its own environmental concerns.
Sorbent sponge-like material is usually used as a final measure to get rid of the final traces of the oil, but that material is often very expensive and hard to produce in large quantities.
Professor Xu said the material they had developed was relatively low cost by comparison and very easy to produce in large quantities, meaning it could be used as the primary containment method for oil spills in the future.
On top of that, the researchers were also able to “flip” the material’s hydrophobia, depending on the proportions of chemicals used - meaning it could also function as a highly water-absorbent sponge.
They hope both of these properties could result in its being adapted for use as a cleaning product.
There have been more than 700 major oil spills worldwide in the past 20 years, with the most recent, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, also the largest.
The spill lasted for 87 days, spilling the equivalent of four million barrels of oil, directly affecting 180,000 square kilomtres of ocean.
Containment efforts included 1300 kilometres of booms as well as absorbent and dispersant materials.
Queensland saw a major oil spill in 2009 when 230 tonnes of fuel oil as well as other chemicals were spilled from a cargo ship into the Coral Sea north of Moreton Bay during Cyclone Hamish.
The eventual slick affected an equivalent of 60 kilometres of coastline from several islands in Moreton Bay to the Sunshine Coast.
Data collected by the Queensland Government as at 2016 showed there had been 879 opil spills of various sizes into Queensland ports and coastal waters since 2002.
The QUT research findings have been published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry.