This project addresses the urgent national need of safe scavenging of oil from spills such as the recent and on-going deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Profs. Seal and Hench are using flyash, a waste material resulting from combustion of coal in electrical power plants, to absorb large volumes of oil from an oil-water mixture by a simple chemical alteration of the flyash surface in a cost effective manner. These materials then can be placed in a low-cost oil-permeable mesh packaging material for practical use in oil clean-up. After the clean-up, the materials can be easily recycled by feeding them into a combustion process to recover the thermal value of the oil without decomposition of the flyash. This will be a completely a green process. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be trained in this project, and a sample kit will be made available to schools for science fair projects to stimulate innovative applications to clean the environment.
TECHNICAL DETAILS: The current difficulty of finding an affordable and easily deployable solution to the Gulf oil spill disaster emphasizes urgency for new technologies in oil recovery. This project offers the opportunity to use low temperature chemical processing to tailor inorganic surfaces of complex amorphous aluminosilicates with high surface area at a molecular level. This provides the necessary hydrophobic groups to adsorb organic molecules including long chain hydrocarbons. The process leads to an end product that is a low cost means of absorbing large volumes of oil and also be capable of recovering the energy value of the oil. This project potentially can lead to a general theory converting inorganic inert surfaces to a highly active hydrophobic surface without degrading the refractory characteristics of these inorganic complex silicates. The project is capable of rapid deployment to meet the needs of the current crisis. The RAPID project may result in a prototype process demonstration to commercial partners in the oil and energy sectors for manufacture and rapid deployment of a cost effective means of recovering the oil from shorelines, marsh lands, and water, while retaining the thermal value of the oil rather than disposing of the waste matter in an environmentally damaging manner. The chemically optimized fly ash particles also can potentially be used in an oil recovery process by desorbing the oil from the surface without contamination by the decomposition of the particles.
Oil spills are inevitable consequences of continued development of fossil fuel resources, yet as illustrated by the response to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, there is currently a lack of effective and economical technologies to clean up massive oil spills over water. The objective of this research was to develop an economical, effective oil sorbent material made from coal fly ash powder, which is a waste product from coal-fired power plants. Millions of tons of fly ash are disposed of in land fills in the United States each year, so there is an environmental and economic incentive to find productive uses for this industrial byproduct. Fly ash is a poor oil sorbent because its small particles are smooth, non-porous, and hydrophilic, meaning they preferentially soak up water instead of oil. Researchers at the University of Central Florida used a simple chemical treatment to transform fly ash into a porous, hydrophobic powder that soaks up oil and floats on the surface of water. The key technologies for this process are the transformation of fly ash into nanostructured mineral phases called zeolites, and the attachment of a single layer of hydrophobic molecules to the transformed particle surfaces. A fly-ash-derived oil sorbent presents a unique advantage because the oil-saturated powder could potentially be recycled back to power plants as a fuel, thereby recovering the energy value of the oil.
