IIT Guwahati researchers aim to address environmental crisis

GUWAHATI: In the petroleum industry, oil leakage and oil spill accidents happen frequently during offshore oil exploitation and oil transportation. This severe water contamination threatens the health of human beings, including other living species. Therefore, the treatment of industrial oily waste water and the separation of oil spill from water has become a worldwide challenging task.

To overcome this problem, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT-G) researchers have developed a novel highly porous and water repellent superhydrophobic cotton composite material containing Metal-Organic Framework (MOF), which can absorb oil selectively from oil-water mixture. The MOF composite has great capability for selective separation of the oils from oil/water mixtures, and the separation efficiency lies between 95 per cent and 98 per cent, irrespective of the chemical composition and density of the oils. Besides, the MOF composite is also able to absorb large volumes of oils and can be reused for minimum 10 times so that the sorbents can provide more recovery of the spilled oil.

The research team was led by Dr. Shyam P. Biswas, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry. IIT Guwahati. The results of this pathbreaking work have recently been published in the reputed peer-reviewed journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces belonging to American Chemical Society, stated a press release.

Explaining the motive of the research, Dr. Shyam P. Biswas, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, said, "In our work, we focused on a real problem in environmental water pollution in current time. Our goal was to develop a new material which could be synthesized easily and should be cost effective. We have grown our new MOF material on the surface of medical cotton, which is environment friendly and cost effective. Such low-cost material will reduce the production cost of the material for large scale industrial synthesis for real applications, compared to currently available materials in the market."

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