Joule-heated absorbent “sponge” cleans up crude oil spills
Joule-heated absorbent “sponge” cleans up crude oil spills lead image
Society is still deeply dependent on oil, constantly seeking out and extracting increasingly hard-to-reach oil deposits. This results in larger and more frequent oil spills, devastating natural environments and requiring expensive cleanup efforts.
Yan et al. developed a superabsorbent sponge for removing crude oil from water. Their solution is fast, cheap, efficient, and produces no secondary pollution.
Crude oil is extremely toxic and difficult to separate from water, making cleaning up spills particularly challenging. It also makes it challenging to develop solutions to this problem.
“Although we only used a small amount of crude oil during the experiment, the toxicity, cleaning, and subsequent processing of crude oil still posed many difficulties for us,” said author Duanhong Yan. “This further strengthened our determination to perform this study.”
After extensive effort, the authors settled on stearic acid and carbon nanotubes wrapped polyurethane sponge (SCPU). The sponge is hydrophobic but absorbs oil. When an electric current is run through it, it increases its temperature to 170°C in just over a minute, reducing the viscosity of the crude oil and allowing it to be easily extracted.
The result is a material that can absorb large quantities of crude oil and release it on command. The sponge is also mechanically stable and features a scalable production method.
“We plan to further optimize the preparation process, shorten the preparation time, and save material usage while achieving the same effect,” said Yan. “In addition, we plan to add more performance to the absorbent, including different heating methods and remote position control.”
Source: “Stearic acid/CNTs-wrapped superhydrophobic/oleophilic sponge with Joule-heating effect for efficient removal of crude oil,” by Duanhong Yan, Kai Yin, Yao Liu, Pengyu Yang, Jun He, Yin Huang, Fan Zhang, and Christopher J. Arnusch, Applied Physics Letters (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0241597 .
