“Oil spill-Cleaning and Recovery by multi-layered fiber tubes”

Manu Chaturvedi, Animesh Choudhary, Manan Manoj Adlakha

B.Tech in Applied Petroleum Engineering(2016-20)

Department of Petroleum and Earth Sciences

ABSTRACT

In recent years, oil spills have been tremendously harming the environment. The major
challenges that the world today faces is its cleaning and recovery. The conventional methods
used for this purpose are both economically depressing and less efficient. Companies and
governments all over the world are helpless about the large amount of energy that is wasted and
the environmental disruption that is directly caused as a result of oil spill.

Our idea aims at the use of a specially designed three layered tube, “Polycoweed” which consists
of three layers consisting of milkweed fiber, cotton fiber and finally a layer of polypropylene.
The tube is mostly made up of naturally occurring substances and so it is highly cost effective
and at the same time eco-friendly.

The conventional method used only propylene tubes which were able to clean up the oil spill but
weren’t able to recover oil after cleaning. Polycoweed will not only clean up the oil spill but at
the same time recover the absorbed oil. The cotton fiber and the milkweed fiber that we have
used have special ability to absorb about 30-40 times of oil of their own weight. Also the tube
that we designed can be reused 4-5 times, which makes it highly cost-efficient.

The novelty lies in the fact that this tube “Polycoweed” isn’t only cost-effective but will also
generate revenue from oil that is recovered. This tube is the solution to all the problems which
this oil driven world was searching for.

Keyword- Polypropylene, Milkweed Fiber, Cotton Fiber, Multilayer