Oil spills? Magnetic soap to the rescue!

Oil spills from a sunken ship? Magnetic soap to the rescue!

 

An international team of scientists is now at work on a soap that uses magnetic fields to dissolve materials, according to a report on the British Broadcasting Co.

 

The BBC report said the magnetic soap is similar to ordinary soap, but has iron atoms that help form tiny particles that are easily removed magnetically.

 

Experts said further development may lead to applications in cleaning up oil spills and waste water .

 

"If you'd have said about 10 years ago to a chemist: 'Let's have some soap that responds to magnets', they'd have looked at you with a very blank face," BBC quoted co-author Julian Eastoe of the University of Bristol as saying.

 

"We were interested to see, if you went back to the chemical drawing board with the tool-kit of modern synthetic chemistry, if you could...design one," Eastoe told BBC.

 

According to BBC, soap is made of long molecules with ends that behave differently, with one end of the molecule attracted to water and the other repelled by it.

 

Soap gets its "detergent" action from attaching to oily, grimy surfaces, with the "water-hating" end breaking up molecules at that surface, BBC said.

 

The soap molecules then gather up into droplets in which all the "water-loving" ends face outward.

 

Designer molecules

 

Eastoe and his team started with detergent molecules that he said were "very similar to what you'd find in your kitchen or bathroom" - one of which can be found in mouthwash.

 

The team found a way to add iron atoms into the molecules. The droplets that the soap formed were attracted to a magnet.

 

But as single iron atoms would not behave as tiny individual magnets, the scientists took a view at the molecular level.

 

Samples sent to the Institute Laue Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France, where an intense beam of neurons, sub-atomic particles, shed more light on the matter.

 

They found the iron particles gathered neatly together into tiny clumps of iron that could respond to a magnetic field.

 

"We have uncovered the principle by which you can generate this kind of material and now it's back to the drawing board to make it better," Easton said, although he cautioned the research is still in the laboratory stage.

 

Magnetic test

 

A separate article on CNET said the team tested the soap's magnetic properties by inserting a magnet into a test tube containing the soap solution, water, and oil.

 

The team found the soap was able to rise through the water and oil to reach the magnet.

 

CNET said the current problem with detergents used to clean oil spills is that they often require the addition of an electrical charge, temperature, or pressure change, or an alteration in pH, to become effective.

 

"All of these processes negatively impact the environment or cost a lot of money to implement as a corrective measure,": it said.

 

Not yet ready

 

Also, CNET said the magnetic soap is not quite ready for prime time just yet.

 

"From a commercial point of view, though these exact liquids aren't yet ready to appear in any household product, by proving that magnetic soaps can be developed, future work can reproduce the same phenomenon in more commercially viable liquids for a range of applications from water treatment to industrial cleaning products," Eastoe said. — TJD, GMA News