Advanced Aerogels from Wool Waste Fibers for Oil Spill Cleaning Applications

Oil spills causes severe degradation to marine ecosystems and poses long term health effects on many animals on the food chain, including humans. A potential viable eco-friendly solution to oil spill clean-ups is the utilization of wool waste fibers as sorbent material, due to is naturally oleophilic nature and abundance as a waste. Repurposing wool waste also allow us to tackle another issue this waste poses: decreasing landfill spaces. This study aims to develop wool aerogels using wool waste fibers and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a cross-linking binder. The synthesized aerogels exhibit high porosity (97.73-99.63%) and low densities (0.004-0.023 g/cm(3)). After being coated with methyltriethoxysilane (MTEOS), the aerogels exhibit great hydrophobicity with contact angles up to 138 degrees. Using pseudo-first and pseudo-second order models to study the kinetics of the aerogels' oil absorption performance, it is found that the oil absorption kinetics is better modelled after the pseudo-second order model. The best performing wool-based aerogel recorded an oil absorption capacity of 136.2 g/g, an estimated 9.1 and 15.3 times better than commercial counterparts, polypropylene mat and nonwoven polypropylene respectively. The aerogel fabrication technique (freeze-drying) employed in this study is also 2.5 times faster than the conventional solgel method. The promising results obtained demonstrate that the wool fiber as a great material capable of generating high engineering value and provides a novel alternative in solving environmental impacts plagued by oil spills and landfill-demanding wool waste.