The next big breakthrough when it comes to cleaning up disastrous oil spills in the ocean just might come from the ocean itself. Or, rather, an inhabitant of the ocean.
Researchers from China's Harbin Institute of Technology have just published a study in Nature Communications outlining how they came up with a fascinating and novel approach to cleaning oil spills in-situ — at the site of the oil spill itself — using technology that's new, but also millions of years old.
It's a living sponge.
Specifically, E. aspergillum, known familiarly as the Venus flower, a deepwater sea sponge that normally lives at depths of 3,000 feet. The scientists figured out that these sea sponges have a body structure that is very good at slowing high turbulence water flows, allowing the filtering components of their body to more easily absorb nutrients from the water around them, even when the water is moving in complex flows.
That's been a problem for traditional methods used to clean up oil spills at the source.
"Since the 1979 Atlantic Empress disaster (an oil tanker that sank in the Caribbean), interception and adsorption have been the primary methods for oil spill recovery, but these are sensitive to water-flow fluctuation," explained lead author of the study Shijie You, according to Physics World.
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You's team essentially built a copy of the sea sponge's architecture in what's called a vortex-anchored filter (VAF). The sponge has a complex internal structure that is able to dissipate high-energy water flow into smaller pockets of calmer water.
According to You, this increases the efficiency of the sponge's filtering. By mimicking this capability, You's team built a VAF that does something similar, but rather than filtering out food, it filters out particles of oil suspended in the seawater.
Under stress testing, the VAF filtered out an astonishing 97% of oils from water, regardless of how turbulent the water was. If this technology can be scaled, it has tremendous potential applications when it comes to cleaning up ocean pollution. Oil spills, of course, but perhaps it could be used for separating microplastics from the water column. The possibilities are numerous.
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"We look forward to applying VAF-based technologies to solve sea pollution problems with a filter that has an outstanding flexibility and adaptability, easy-to-handle operability and scalability, environmental compatibility, and life-cycle sustainability," You said, according to Physics World.
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The whole ocean-loving world looks forward to that too.
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