New materials repel oil underwater, could better clean up oil spills

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have announced a significant step forward in the development of materials that can ward off oil - a discovery that could lead to new protective coatings and better approaches to cleaning up oil spills. In a new paper in the journal Advanced Functional Materials , professor of chemical and biological engineering David Lynn and assistant scientist Uttam Manna describe new coatings that are extremely oil-repellant (or "superoleophobic") in underwater environments. Droplets of oil resting above a superoleophobic surface. Because of the material's oil-repelling qualities, the drops essentially remain suspended above the surface in an oblong shape, as opposed to fouling the surface. Photo: David Lynn Lynn and Manna didn't initially set out to develop highly oil-repelling materials, but their work on fine-tuning the nanoand micro-scale structure of materials led to the unexpected finding. Manna says a unique, layer-by-layer approach to fabricating thin, multi-layer polymer films allowed the researchers to manipulate both the chemistry and the topography of the material, yielding three-dimensional structures that are porous at the micrometer and nanometer scale. Even when damaged or subjected to physical abrasion, these porous materials remain superoleophobic.