Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I a planning to do a project on cleaning oil spill using cactus thorn technique. Can I get some help please

Hi Ashek,

What a cool idea! I had not heard about this potential method of collecting oil spill droplets from water. It was really interesting to read about it because I learned something new--that cacti can collect water from the atmosphere by condensing it on special conical spines: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-oil-copper ... pines.html

That was a great leap of imagination to think of using an array of copper spines to collect oil droplets! I hope it works in a real-world situation.

As to how you can turn this cactus thorn method into a science project, I don’t know how you would make the copper spines. If you look at the photo of the ‘spine’ in the article from phys.org above you will see a scale bar that is 500 micrometers [microns] long. I did a calculation on the image and found that the spine is about 2 millimeters long, but it tapers to a very sharp point. I think the copper might also have been treated with some chemical to make it attract oil and repel water.

How did you plan on getting or making an array of spines like this? I went to the published article in Nature Communications [http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/13080 ... tml#access] but of course it is not free so I could not read the Methods section to learn how the researchers made the array. I would bet, however, that the method requires special equipment and reagents that are way beyond the budget of the average school lab. You could ask someone in the engineering department of a university if they have any equipment that could be used to fabricate copper spines of this size and spacing.

I had an idea that maybe a 3D printer could be used to produce an array like this but I don’t know how you would print it in copper, and plastic probably wouldn’t work unless you could electroplate a layer of copper onto it afterwards.

This would really make a marvelous science project and I hope you figure out a way to do it. Maybe some of the other experts have an idea how to fabricate the spines. You could also post your query to the engineering forum because those experts should know more about materials and fabrication methods than us life scientists.

Let us know what you decide.

God luck!

Sybee

Thanks a lot for giving me all the information. I think I will try it out next year so will do some investigation and make a list of people whom I can contact.
Thank you, I will keep you posted all the information I receive. This is going to be a project for 2015- 2016.