Study of Bird Feathers to Improve Design of Absorbent Pads for Greater Efficiency of Oil Spill Removal

Abstract

Oil spills in the ocean cause both short and long-term environmental damage and can pose threats to wildlife and ecosystems. The use of sorbents such as absorbent pads is one method which can remedy oil spills, because of their hydrophobicity and oleophilic nature. However, many of such absorbent pads are non-biodegradable and costly. Bird feathers are able to adsorb oil well due to their structure and are cheap organic materials. This research aims at studying the features of bird feathers which contribute to their oil adsorbing ability, so as to adapt these features to current absorbent pad models to determine an ideal structure that can increase efficiency of oil removal. In this research, pheasant and duck feathers were compared with four types of oil absorbent pads by determining which material absorbs the most oil relative to its initial mass. The materials were further observed using microscopes and a SEM machine. It was determined that pheasant feathers are better at oil adsorbing due to the size of their apparent contact angles, which affect the amount of oil which can enter the pores between the feather fibres (Cassie and Baxter in Trans Faraday Soc 40:546, [1]). It was also found that absorbent pads with larger fibre widths were able to adsorb and retain more oil, which may be due to a higher surface area or a lower contact angle of the oil on the surface of the pad.

Appendix

See Tables 3 and 4.

Table 3 Experimental data from trial run I

Table 4 Experimental data from trial run II