Characteristics of some natural fibrous assemblies for efficient oil spill cleanup

Abstract EN

Marine oil spill cleaning is an essential head target for all environmental concerns due to its serious results in destroying marine life and vegetation.

Cleaning oil spill is done by three main procedures, namely burning, isolating and skimming and collection.

This work was done to investigate the efficiency of four natural fibrous sorbents, namely cotton fibers, seed floss of kapok and milkweed or usher and sheep fleece for sorption of three commercial petroleum oil products, namely diesel engine oil, hydraulic oil and diesel fuel.

Four densities of the fibrous fillers (0.2, 0.5, 0.8 and l.lg/cm’) as well as three temperature levels (25, 40 and 60°C) were tested on three different kinds of petroleum oils.

The scanning electron microscopy showed clearly smoothness surface for both seed floss resources and the roughness of the fleece surface which has an important role in oil sorption mechanism in the latter case.

Higher crystallinity was investigated by the wide angle-XRD of milkweed seed floss was more than that for kapok.

Oil retention of the four fiberous assemblies decreases with increase in temperature from 25° to 60°C.

Higher temperatures reduce oil viscosity.

Oil retention of cotton fibers was the highest (about lOg oil/g of sorbent for the assembly density of 0.2 g/cm^) and gradually decreased from kapok one to other.

Within species, the lower the assembly density the higher the oil retention obtained.

Further, the assembly density of 0.8 and 1.1 g/cm^ gave very low oil retention due to the shortage occurred in the capillary bulk due to excess compression within them