Team Members: Ana Arežina, Kristen Abels, Patrick Hehl, Maddison Kargus, Cassandra Stothers
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Li Xi
Project Description: Oil contamination of water is, unfortunately, a common occurrence with industrial process streams, storm drainage, and even environmental oil spills. These scenarios pose a risk to the global ecosystem, and consequently, to human health. While commercially viable separation products exist, they still face numerous challenges including required separation time, poor separation efficiency, elevated operating costs, and poor treatment of emulsions. This represents an opportunity for technological improvement that our capstone project aims to address through the use of superwetting materials. The objective of our capstone project is to build off results reported in literature to design a guar gum hydrogel-coated woven fabric filter for oil-water separation and evaluate its potential to achieve industrial scale, commercial viability. Project is supported by Oligomaster.