CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The spill of oils and petrochemicals in water environments can cause great ecological system damage, leads to pollution and energy waste and threatens human?s health. Fast and economic techniques to remove the oil from the water, such as burning of the oil and the use of dispersants, cause collateral pollution. Other traditional techniques such as oil skimmers, air flotation, and centrifuge are limited by low separation efficiency, cumbersome equipment, and high cost. We have developed a selective kit to efficiently clean up oil from water surfaces: hydrophobic/oleophilic membranes and two types of oil selective sorbents. These materials are obtained by RF plasma discharge of commercial grade acetylene which realizes the polymerization of carbonaceous nanoparticles (NPs). The NPs are hydrophobic and form a highly porous nanostructure that can be used as a nanosponge adsorbing up to 30 g/g (ASTM 726-12) of oil. The NPs can also be deposited over a wide variety of permeable substrates such as polypropylene non-woven fabric, creating a hierarchical rough surface and working as oil selective membranes that are able to resist water pressure up to tens of centimeters and successfully separate oil from water in continuous gravity driven separation tests. Studies show it is possible to optimize the permeability-water pressure resistance compromise properties of the membranes according to the application needs. The combination of these selective membranes and highly adsorbent commercial polymeric fiber filling, leads to low weight, low production cost pillow type sorbents which repel water while achieving up to a 50 g/g sorbency. These sorbents also allow the recovery of up to 80% of the adsorbed oil and can be reused. Given the availability of RF plasma equipment on industrial scale, the materials reported here could be large scale produced.