Polyisobutylene Functionalized Magnetic Nanoparticles for Oil Entrapment From Aqueous Phase.
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abstract
Minimization and control of manmade water pollution on land and marine environment and recovery of pollutants remains a common goal of our society. Problems associated with environmental pollution by hydrocarbon resources has been causing an ever increasing amount of trouble over the years. Only in the US, around 20,000 oil spills are reported annually. Most of these reports are for minor accidents, but some are major ones like the accident in 2010 at BP offshore drilling facility in the Gulf of Mexico that released about 4.9 million barrels of crude oil resulting in severe damage to important habitats. Moreover, hydrocarbons are routinely released during their extraction, processing and distribution adding more challenge to the problem of remediation. There is a number of approached to the problem of oil remediation, including bioremediation and sorbent materials; but these techniques are difficult to implement for practical applications, due to high cost, remediation time and feasibility constraints. As such, oil separation from aqueous phase using hydrophobic polymer bound magnetic nanoparticles has become a promising area of research and has drawn a significant attention. To solve this problem, innovative additive chemical technology and polymer engineering have been developed to address the oil spill remediation; for instance, much research has been performed for the development of nanomaterials for oil separation, from sponges, cellulose aerogels, films, hydrogels, nanowires, magnetic nanocomposites and nanoparticles, among other materials. Application of magnetic nanoparticles is especially promising, since because the added magnetic components pollutants become ready for recovery under applied magnetic field. Thus, it is very important to launch further research on environmentally friendly and highly efficient magnetic materials. Magnetic Nanoparticles (MNPs) have a versatile scope of applications ranging from biomedicine, catalysis, chemical engineering and materials chemistry to name a few. The readily available polyolefin oligomers with terminal unsaturation can be modified to functionalized polyolefins {such as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), and polyisobutylene (PIB)} oligomers, converting them into a wide variety of derivatives. Herein, we propose to prepare these derivatives by standard procedures in our labs (TAMUQ) and use them to prepare hydrophobic polyolefin functionalized iron-oxide nanoparticles for separation of oil from water
