Characterization of a novel gel material for oil-spill remediation

Oil spills. It is therefore critical that we are able to quickly and efficiently mobilize remediation efforts to minimize the negative impact to the surrounding in environment. This presents unique challenges for containment and cleanup when the spill occurs on open water due to the dynamic nature of the aquatic environment.  Historically, these spills have had drastic consequences and there is a clear need for more effective approaches to deal with them. In this presentation we describe and characterize a novel material that appears to form a gel in either oil or water at low concentrations. In both cases, the gel is formed upon cooling after heating to dissolve the material. The aqueous gel that is formed is then shown to behave as an absorbent material capable of absorbing approximately 100 times its mass in oil. In this work we investigate how the compression strength and rate of oil absorption depend on the concentration of the material and the presence of surfactants in the aqueous phase used to form the gel.