Oil spillage is an environmental menace that affects the marine flora and fauna adversely and thus resulting in extreme environmental impact. Thus it is imperative that we have the best processes and equipments in place to either prevent or minimize the damage by clearing the oil spill as soon as possible from the site of the spillage before it reaches the shores.
It is with this intention that the X Challenge was organized by Wendy Schmidt, wife of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt with a prize money of $1.4M for the team that manages to extract more than 2,500 gallons of oil per minute.
The current standard is at 1,000 gallons a minute which was the best effort at the Deep Water Horizon incident. But the Wendy Schmidt X Challenge required the participants to extract 2,500 gallons of oil at a rate of 70 percent oil to water.
Elastec a firm based in Carmi, Illinois won the prize with the help of their Oleophilic Skimmer which uses plastic discs that are grooved to increase the surface area, are rotated using hydraulic motors that rapidly accelerates the recovery process due to the meniscus effect. The oil thus collected is then channeled into a container.
A single wheel prototype can collect up to 32 gallons in 35 seconds. The Elastec team combined multiple plastic discs together and was able to collect about 4670 gallons per minute and also managed a rate of 90 percent, way higher than the 70 percent limit.
One must admit that this is a wonderful innovation which can help improve cleanup efforts drastically. You would be surprised to know that the Oleophilic Skimmer concept was invented by mistake at a local spillage in Carmi when a plastic bucket accidentally blown onto the site and as the bucket moved it attracted oil along with it and thus the idea was born.
We understand that understanding the technicality of the process will be difficult; hence we would suggest you to go ahead and the watch the video demonstration of the Oleophilic Skimmer in action.
