News

Please see the news article on the Edmonton Sun website for more details.

Researchers at the MNT Lab have developed an innovative way to deposit drops of oil/water on low-energy surfaces (superhydrophobic/superoleophobic), which creates a paradigm shift in terms of understanding “under-water” wetting behavior of large number of substrates.

Most of the urban population in India use UV filtration at home for drinking water. Similarly, there are a large number of products available in the market that does water treatment and claims to produce water quality as per the standards required for drinking or recreational water.

Many people remember disastrous ocean oil spills such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez supertanker incident in Alaska, and of course the 2010 BP drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

A major part of the problem is that cleanup becomes extremely difficult and costly once the oil sticks to a surface, whether that be rocks or sand or plants, birds or the sea floor and marine life.

University of Alberta mechanical engineering researchers have shown that a simple glass surface can be made to repel oil underwater. This has huge implications for development of a chemical repellent technology for use in cleaning up oil spills.

Bigger challenges need bigger solutions.

In an academic environment, that can mean pulling together a team of researchers dispersed across a campus, a country, or the entire world.

“If I’m able to solve the problem myself I shouldn’t be working on that problem, it would be too trivial,” University of Alberta researcher Sushanta Mitra recently remarked to a colleague.

Carbon-dioxide emissions created by the combustion of oil, coal and natural gas account for 90 per cent of human-caused CO2 emissions each year. Without a determined effort to curtail or contain those emissions, the global warming implications could be dire.