Eco-Friendly Chemical Herders For Remediation Of Maritime Oil Spill
type: CreativeWork
description: Crude oil spills on a sea surface can cause severe and immediate damage to marine life, as well as long term damage to the aquatic ecosystem. Current response methods for maritime oil spill remediation are twofold: The first are the use of floating barrier booms to confine and thicken the spill slick to smaller areas, where they can be subsequently removed by mechanical skimming or in-situ burning. The second are the use of dispersants which are aerially sprayed onto the slick to emulsify the slick through wave action into smaller droplets that can be dispersed through the water column for degradation. However, neither of those methods serves as a perfect solution for oil spill remediation. Booms are difficult to deploy while dispersants retain the oil in the ecosystem for extended periods of time. This thesis studies chemical herding as an alternative methodology for the remediation of oil spills on the sea surface. In chemical herding, surfactants are used as chemical herders to draw the slick upon itself to a reduced area and a large thickness so that it can be burned or skimmed. The herding surfactants are aerially sprayed onto the sea surface around the periphery of the oil slick, where they form a monolayer which reduces the air/sea tension (increases the surface pressure) at the slick edge. This reduction causes an imbalance of interfacial forces and forces the oil spill to retract to a thicker slick with smaller areas. While chemical herding has been part of the arsenal of methodologies intended to be used to remediate oil spills, the method suffers from two key drawbacks which prevent its wide spread use: The most effective surfactants used to date which are on the U.S. EPA National Contingency Plan for herding are the hydrocarbon surfactant, sorbiton monolaurate (Span 20 or Thickslick 6535) and a polydimethylsiloxane polymer surfactant (OP-40). OP-40, because of its polymeric nature, has the potential to bio-accumulate and is therefore not eco-firendly. In…
abstract: Crude oil spills on a sea surface can cause severe and immediate damage to marine life, as well as long term damage to the aquatic ecosystem. Current response methods for maritime oil spill remediation are twofold: The first are the use of floating barrier booms to confine and thicken the spill slick to smaller areas, where they can be subsequently removed by mechanical skimming or in-situ burning. The second are the use of dispersants which are aerially sprayed onto the slick to emulsify the slick through wave action into smaller droplets that can be dispersed through the water column for degradation. However, neither of those methods serves as a perfect solution for oil spill remediation. Booms are difficult to deploy while dispersants retain the oil in the ecosystem for extended periods of time. This thesis studies chemical herding as an alternative methodology for the remediation of oil spills on the sea surface. In chemical herding, surfactants are used as chemical herders to draw the slick upon itself to a reduced area and a large thickness so that it can be burned or skimmed. The herding surfactants are aerially sprayed onto the sea surface around the periphery of the oil slick, where they form a monolayer which reduces the air/sea tension (increases the surface pressure) at the slick edge. This reduction causes an imbalance of interfacial forces and forces the oil spill to retract to a thicker slick with smaller areas. While chemical herding has been part of the arsenal of methodologies intended to be used to remediate oil spills, the method suffers from two key drawbacks which prevent its wide spread use: The most effective surfactants used to date which are on the U.S. EPA National Contingency Plan for herding are the hydrocarbon surfactant, sorbiton monolaurate (Span 20 or Thickslick 6535) and a polydimethylsiloxane polymer surfactant (OP-40). OP-40, because of its polymeric nature, has the potential to bio-accumulate and is therefore not eco-firendly. In…
author: ZHOU, HAO
keywords: eco-friendly chemical herder
date published: 2020-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:57:21Z
provider: City University of New York - City College
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: City University of New York - City College