Oil-Capturing Technology Offers 10x Improvement Cleaning Up Hazardous Spills

 

AUSTIN, Texas  To combat the extreme environmental toll of major oil spills, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have created a technology that could significantly improve cleanup capabilities compared with current methods.

The new technology uses a dual-layer mesh roller coupled with an induction heating technique, with material properties that allow it to separate oil from water and then remove that oil from the ocean with high efficiency and throughput. In experiments, the researchers showed the potential to retrieve up to 1,400 kilograms of viscous oil per square meter per hour, which is about 10 times better than the way oil is cleaned up today.

“When you have a widespread oil spill in the ocean, it slowly diffuses into the water, so how quickly and efficiently you can retrieve the oil has a major impact on the marine environment,” said Guihua Yu, a professor of materials science in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute.