https://www.fastcompany.com/90537543/this-cute-little-robot-floats-to-oil-spills-and-sucks-up-the-oil
[Design, not a product. images, video and link in online article]
08-06-20
This cute little robot floats to oil spills and sucks up the oil
Inside the robot is a nanomaterial made from leaves that repels water
and attracts oil.
By Adele Peters
A decade after a BP drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, sending
an estimated 168 million gallons of oil gushing into the water over the
course of months, local wildlife are still struggling to recover. Many
of the people who worked to clean up the spill are still experiencing
health effects. At the time, the “cleanup” strategy involved setting oil
slicks on fire and spraying mass quantities of a chemical meant to
disperse it, both of which helped get rid of the oil, but also worsened
pollution.
A new robot designed to clean oil spills, now in development,
demonstrates how future spills could be handled differently. The robot
navigates autonomously on the ocean surface, running on solar power.
When oil sensors on the device detect a spill, it triggers a pump that
pushes oil and water inside, where a custom nanomaterial sucks up the
oil and releases clean water.
“The material repels water and attracts oil,” says Tejas Sanjay Kabra, a
graduate student at North Carolina State University who has been
developing the technology, called Soilios, over several years. While
some other nanomaterials are now in use in oil spills, the new material
is unique in that it’s made from leaves rather than fossil fuels. And
while current processes still involve burning oil at the site of the
spill, the new material can recover the oil. The robot, which is an
entry in the 2020 James Dyson Award competition, can go out, collect the
oil, and come back, and then the oil would be removed from the
sponge-like material, which can be reused as many as 180 times.
Kabra 3D-printed a small prototype of the robot, which he tested in a
lab, a swimming pool, and then the open ocean. (The small version, about
two feet across, can collect 20 gallons of oil at a time; the same
device can be scaled up to much larger sizes). He now hopes to bring the
product to market as quickly as possible, as major oil spills continue
to occur—such as the spill in Russia in June that sent more than 20,000
metric tons of diesel into a pristine part of the Arctic.
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