Source abstract
Abstract
Oil spills remain a worldwide challenge and need emergency “spill-SOS” actions when they occur. Conventional methods suffer from complex processes and high cost. Here, we demonstrate a solar-heating siphon-capillary oil skimmer (S-SOS) that harvests solar energy, gravitational potential energy, and solid surface energy to enable efficient oil spill recovery in a self-pumping manner. The S-SOS is assembled by an inverted U-shape porous architecture combining solar-heating, siphon, and capillary effects, and works without any external power or manual interventions. Importantly, solid surface energy is used by capillary adsorption to enable the self-starting behavior, gravitational potential energy is utilized by siphon transport to drive the oil flow, and solar energy is harvested by solar-thermal conversion to facilitate the transport speed. In the proof-of-concept work, an all-carbon hierarchical architecture (VG/GF) is fabricated by growing vertically oriented graphene nanosheets (VGs) on a monolith of graphite felt (GF) via a plasma-enhanced method to serve as the U-shape architecture. Consequently, an oil-recovery rate of 35.2 L m–2 h–1 is obtained at ambient condition. When exposed to normal solar irradiation, the oil-recovery rate dramatically increases to 123.3 L m–2 h–1. Meanwhile, the solar-thermal energy efficiency is calculated to be 75.3%. Moreover, the S-SOS system presents excellent stability without obvious performance-degradation over 60 h. The outstanding performance is ascribed to the enhanced siphon action, capillary action, photonic absorption, and interfacial heating in the plasma-made graphene nanostructures. Multiple merits make the current S-SOS design and the VG/GF nanostructures promising for efficient oil recovery and transport of energy stored in chemical bonds.
Source: openalex_inverted_index · Quality: baseline
Affiliations
State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization, College of Energy Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310027, China
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557, United States
Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, United States
Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and California nanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, United States
School of Chemistry, Physics and Mechanical Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland 4000, Australia
Joint CSIRO-QUT Sustainable Processes and Devices Laboratory, P.O. Box 218, Lindfield, New South Wales 2070, Australia
Funding
University of Nevada, Reno · Australian Research Council · National Natural Science Foundation of China · National Science Foundation · Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province · Central Committee of the Communist Party of China