| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Minxiang Zeng zeng692@tamu.edu Chemical Engineering |
| Faculty Mentor: | Zhengdong Cheng, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Spring 2017: (full) |
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Team Size:
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8 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Available conference opportunities will be shared to team members. |
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Team Needs:
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Strong teamwork skills |
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Description:
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Oil contaminated wastewater from petrochemical industries each year causes serious environmental issues and low resource utilization. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other oily chemicals in wastewater pose a potential risk to aquatic ecosystems as their decomposition causes excessive oxygen consumption, which leads to an increased mortality rate in fish populations. Meanwhile, those “harmful” chemicals could be useful in other areas such as energy fields or pharmaceutical industries. Therefore, the challenge of effective oil–water separation has been highlighted. Conventional oil-water separation methods including gravity separation, air flotation, coagulation, de-emulsification, have the inevitable disadvantages such as low efficiency, high energy consumption, recontamination problems. Separation of oil and water is essentially an interfacial science problem, and thus new strategies based on unique wettability materials have shown to be effective and advantageous. Herein, we proposed a hydrogel coated superhydrophilic filter paper for efficient oil recovery from oily wastewater. |