I’ve heard about oil booms deployed in the Gulf of Mexico to absorb oil from the BP leak.
How do the booms absorb oil in preference to water?
I don’t think booms are designed to absorb anything. They are physical barriers that prevent anything on the surface of the water from passing by.
Water is polar and oil is nonpolar, so they will dissolve in different solvents (but not in each other), and will be absorbed by different materials.
if a boom was made with a nonpolar absorbent material at the top it could collect only the oil.
people were home brewing absorbers stuffing hair into panty hose. the story didn’t relate number of people, amount of material, where specifically used or how useful.
I’m sure it’s going on all over the country but a lot of the dog groomers around here are sending dog hair and panty hose down that way to make them.
NPR just ran a story about the organization, Matter of Trust, and their hair-collection program. An older article about them also appeared on Slashdot today.
I think our cats might generate enough fur to clean up a good portion of the gulf on their own.
There are absorbant booms that do not absorb much water, but mostly absorb oil, as Chronos mentions, but that is not the usual case. Most Booms are just big blow-up tubes that float on the surface of the water that are meant to block the floating oil from drifting somewhere you don’t want it. In my experience, they rarely work unless there is only a little oil and there is not very much wind, and the sea is relatively calm. Almost a waste of time in most cases, except that they will pool up a little oil that can make suction removal a little more effective.
And booms that soak up oil are not that effective in the case of more than a very minor spill, because they soak up a lot of oil (and water, which they are not supposed to soak up, but they do) and ride too low in the water to do any good blocking. In the case of a substantial spill, absorbant booms are filled up WAY to fast to do any substantial good, and they are not the most efficient way to pick up oil - unless you are talking about just a thin skim.