Anish Tuteja has developed a method of extracting oil from water that his research team only half-jokingly refers to as a “gigantic strainer.”

Tuteja’s work involves a “dip-coding” process in which commercially available porous materials like cloth or polyester fabrics are covered in a thin layer of the artificial membrane that Tuteja and his researchers have been perfecting since last October.

The membrane then acts as a strainer, holding back oil while enabling water to pass through.

“It’s water-loving and oil-hating at the same time,” Arun Kota, one of the researchers on the project, said of the artificial membrane.

According to Tuteja, the idea of oil-water separation is completely counterintuitive.

“Take any surface in nature and if you put water through it, oil will come too,” Tuteja said. Nevertheless, “the idea was there as to what we thought might work, and the proof was really to show that it works.”

Tuteja’s membrane involves a mixture of two elements: an oil-repellant nanoparticle and a “water-loving” plastic.

“We have to mix them in the right quantity that it can pull the water down but push the oil up,” Tuteja said.

Tuteja and his researchers searched for that ideal balance through a months-long process of trial and error.

According to Kota, the membrane is now almost flawless, with recent tests extracting 99% oil from oil-water mixtures.

However, the technology has yet to be tested outside of a small laboratory setting.

As Tuteja explained, larger-scale tests can only occur once the technology gains visibility.

To that end, Tuteja and his team plan to publish the results of their research in a “high-impact journal” and have also filed a patent, Tuteja said.

Tuteja said he hopes the “dip-coding” process can be used to aid situations like the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

As Tuteja pointed out, massive quantities of oil from the Gulf spill sank beneath the surface of the ocean and merged with the water, giving the appearance of a clean surface.

“On the surface the ocean looks clean, but underneath there’s plumes and plumes of this oil-water mixture,” Tuteja said. “Right now all they’re doing is skimming the top.”

But Kota said the new membrane can easily tackle such underwater mixtures.

“We have excellent separation happening,” Kota said.

UNDERWATER TURBINES

Courtesy of Tarun Koshy

There has been much debate over plans to install wind turbines on the shores of Lake Michigan. But what if those turbines were shoved under water? Juniors Tarun Koshy and Nicholas Williams have proposed just that. The two want to harness the currently unused power of Michigan lakes and rivers by installing large-scale underwater turbines.

Inspired by a Discovery Channel special he saw as a high school freshman, Koshy decided to research the feasibility of extracting energy from underwater currents. The increase in investment in clean energy and the fact that Michigan is full of bodies of water also convinced Koshy and Williams that underwater turbines could prove successful in Michigan.

“Michigan’s known so much for its water,” Koshy said. “Why not use what’s right in front of us?”

Not to be confused with water turbines, underwater turbines do not require the construction of dams. They work on the same principles as wind turbines but use moving water to turn the propellers, which can generate much more power than wind turbines. Underwater currents produce up to 840 times the energy density of wind, according to Hydro Green Energy, a company that is currently developing a similar idea.

Additionally, water currents are constant, unlike the sporadic nature of wind, making them much more reliable. And they don’t present an eyesore to the communities where they’re installed.