Design & development of a textile based structure made from discarded polyester textured yarns for oil-water separation

Abstract

Filtration textiles are not simply appropriate for oil spills since they need to collect polluted water before separating the oil. To overcome the identified problem, a sorbent textile structure is developed in this project. A textile-based structure is developed using discarded Polyester textured yam waste to remove spilled oil from the surface of water and reduce the environmental damage occurred by oil spill accidents. Reusing waste polyester yarn from yam processing mills for a practical solution is an environmentally friendly strategy. Due to the lack of structural integrity of yarn waste, it was decided to use the polyester textured yarns as a filling material by using the outer netting material as polypropylene (PP) leno mesh which are used as packing materials (generally referred as onion bags). In order to make the sorbent hydrophobic, few approaches were chosen. The effectiveness of the final prototype sorbent was assessed by conducting tests on oil sorption and oil-water selectivity.