Saturday, June 19, 2010
Really? Kevin Costner Will Save Gulf?
The Intersection writes The Red Carpet Treatment for the Gulf Oil Spill. "Kevin Costner, actor and apparent tech-aficionado, has a technology that is designed to quickly and effectively separate oil and water in order to minimize environmental damage from oil spills. Last Friday, the LA Times presented a lovely graphic (shown here) that illustrates and describes how this technology works in just six steps."
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2 comments:
I used to work extensively with centrifuges, but to separate suspended solids from liquids.
Costner's units should work, but like most centrifuges it will not separate the oil and water completely. I would estimate that it should be 90-99% efficient.
By adjusting feed rates, rpm's etc.... different oil/water mixtures can be separated as well.
TT
Yes centrifuges do separate heavy things and light things, but TT is right, it won't be that efficient. The other issue is that emulsified oil in water is actually really hard to separate, regardless of the density difference (crude oil from 790 to 915 kg/m3, sea water 1023 kg/m3), because it is stabilized by the emulsifiers and all the other junk in sea water, that would act as emulsifiers. You might actually need centrifuges in series to make this work.
How do you keep all the other stuff out of the centrifuge (fish, plants)? How many of these things do you need? You need to run a significant amount of water through the centrifuge. I know Kevin Costner knows a lot about water (Waterworld), but I still wonder that if this was easy or worthwhile to do, someone would be doing it already.
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