Development of absorbent materials for open sea spillage oil

Abstract

There are many incidents involving the ship at the sea area causing the oil pollution because of the oil spill. As we know, the oil pollution will give huge impact to the maritime especially to an aquatic live. Since, the issues of oil pollution increasing with time, and the waste of palm oil tree not even use for any usable activity; this research is carried out to investigate the ability of palm oil tree fibers as an absorbent material to recover the oil spill problem and replacing the current commercial absorbent. From the result of surface morphology by OM and SEM, it is observed that these pores on the fiber surface can make it easily to absorb the oil. The XRD analysis is mainly used in crystalline materials forstructural identification, but the result showed that the oil palm tree fibre is an amorphous.Besides that, the result from the experimental setup, where oil sorption capacity is design with certain parameter set up, a conclusion can be made that by increasing the volume of oil,fiber weight and the time consume, the sorption capacity will be increase until a certain limit.From the cyclic sorption or desorption characteristic test, it is prove that the fiber can be use for one time only. However, if it is use for many times, the result will not very efficient.Lastly, from the selectivity test, we can see that the fiber absorb the oil more than the sea water present. As a conclusion, it is possible to use the fibre as an oil spill absorbent material in our country because of its ability in absorbing the oil and easily to be find.