African American invents revolutionary way to purify oil-polluted water

0 / 5 Note: 5

your vote:

D’Ordinary, Arden Warner deals with the physics of accelerators, that is, the problems encountered when bunches of particles are accelerated to form stable beams destined to collide. He is a member of Fermilab and his work therefore had repercussions on the hunt for supersymmetric particles and the famous Brout-Englert-Higgs boson with the Tevatron. Four years ago, while his wife asked him if there was not an effective way to combat the oil spill caused by the explosion of Deepwater Horizon, the researcher had a bright idea. Why not use magnetic fields to collect the oil slick?

Of course, oil itself is not magnetic, but the physicist wondered if it was not possible to turn it into some kind of ferrofluid. Remember that this is a colloidal solution of ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic nanoparticles of a size of the order of 10 nanometers in a solvent or water. It was the chemist Stephen Papell who carried out the first modern synthesis of a ferrofluid by mixing powder of magnetite with dukerosene, therefore gasoline derived from petroleum, in the presence of oleic acid. There are spectacular videos showing the action of a magnetic field on a ferrofluid which then behaves like a kind of magnetized magnetic liquid.

Transform oil into a magnetorheological fluid

Warner wanted to find out, and for that he began to do simple experiments in his garage with a fridge magnet and iron filings in motor oil. Encouraged by the first results, the physicist undertook a more serious study of the phenomenon. It turned out that one could obtain, not a ferrofluid, but a magnetorheological fluid with petroleum. The particles are, in this case, micrometric in size and there are some differences in the behavior of a magnetorheological fluid compared to a ferrofluid. The iron particles or the dust of the magnetite used by Warner have sizes between 2 and 6 microns. With them, a viscous fluid is obtained which follows the movement of these particles when immersed in a magnetic field. The physicist has made some videos that show the effectiveness of his method. It is even more so if the magnetic particles used are also hydrophobic, which means that they will tend to concentrate in the oil.