Abstract
The clean-up of viscous crude-oil spills is a global challenge. Hydrophobic and oleophilic oil sorbents have been demonstrated as promising candidates for oil-spill remediation. However, the sorption speeds of these oil sorbents for viscous crude oil are rather limited. Herein we report a Joule-heated graphene-wrapped sponge (GWS) to clean-up viscous crude oil at a high sorption speed. The Joule heat of the GWS reduced in situ the viscosity of the crude oil, which prominently increased the oil-diffusion coefficient in the pores of the GWS and thus speeded up the oil-sorption rate. The oil-sorption time was reduced by 94.6% compared with that of non-heated GWS. Besides, the oil-recovery speed was increased because of the viscosity decrease of crude oil. This in situ Joule self-heated sorbent design will promote the practical application of hydrophobic and oleophilic oil sorbents in the clean-up of viscous crude-oil spills.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 21521001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 21431006, 21761132008 and 11525211), Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (Grant QYZDJ-SSW-SLH036), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grants KFJ-EW-116, KJZD-EW-M01-1), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB22040402), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant 2014CB931800), the Users with Excellence and Scientific Research Grant of Hefei Science Center of CAS (2015HSC-UE007) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WK6030000018). We thank H.-L. Jiang for help in obtaining the crude oil provided by the China University of Petroleum (Huadong).
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J.G. and S.-H.Y. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. J.G. planned the experiments, performed the experiments, collected and analysed the data, and wrote the paper. S.-H.Y. supervised the project, analysed the results and wrote the paper. L.-A.S. designed and performed the experiments, and collected and analysed the data. H.-A.W. supervised the simulations of heat transfer. Y.-C.W. and Y.-B.Z. performed the simulations and wrote the paper, and contributed to the discussion of energy utilization and optimization design. H.-Y.Z., Y.Z. and H.-W.Z. designed and performed the experiments. H.-B.Y. analysed the results and wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Ge, J., Shi, LA., Wang, YC. et al. Joule-heated graphene-wrapped sponge enables fast clean-up of viscous crude-oil spill. Nature Nanotech 12, 434–440 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.33
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