Chicken feathers, if cut to just the right size, will arrange themselves in an interlocking network that can attract and trap oil spilled on a water surface, says a University of Delaware professor who has filed for a patent on a method of using the feathers to soak up oil spills.
Feather fibers in water attract oil, just as they do on live birds. Surface tensions drive the feathers together, says Richard Wool, a professor in the university's department of chemical engineering who developed technology for maximizing the self-assembly of the soaked feathers to efficiently absorb and remove oil.
The feather fibers must be a certain size and won't assemble correctly if either too long or too short.
The 6 billion pounds of feathers generated annually by the U.S. poultry industry could remediate an oil spill covering 200,000 square miles, equal to the economic zone of the Gulf of Mexico, Wool says.
Wool told Meatingplace the feather fibers could be available for oil spill clean-up in a few weeks to a few months if funding for the process were available. Bales of feather fibers would be scattered on the oil spill off shore via plane or helicopter, he said.
"The fibers are not attracted to the water, but they are attracted to the oil, just as they are on live birds," Wool told a University of Delaware publication. "And once a network of oil-soaked fibers is formed, it will reassemble, or restructure, even if it's temporarily broken up by wind or wave action."
Wool, whose research group has also used chicken feather fibers to reinforce polymer composites in circuit boards, plans to conduct further tests on oil at an ocean spill simulator in New Jersey.
Source: Meatingplace
