Ferro-Clean: Ferrofluidic Extensional Rheological Response for Ocean CLEAN-up  

Funding detail

Total Budget: 83.1 k€
CEFT funding: 53.6 k€
Program: MIT Portugal Program 2017 Call for Exploratory Proposals
Funded by: FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia
Coordination: Francisco J. Galindo Rosales

Short Description

FERROCLEAN is a multidisciplinary project gathering experts in material science, transport phenomena, and marine and environmental sciences that aims at developing knowledge to improve the efficiency of the magnetic cleaning up process of oil spills. This will be achieved through the following objectives:

1) provide an experimental tool for rheological characterization of magnetic fluids simultaneously undergone to an extensional flow and to the presence of a magnetic field, which intensity and orientation would be tunable;

2) perform a systematic and full rheological characterization under shear and extensional flow of different ferrofluids, i.e. size and surface chemistry of particles, carrier fluid, intensity of magnetic field and orientation; and, finally,

3) assess the relationship between efficiency of the Halbach array in water cleanup, including the decrease in chemical load and toxicity potential, with the rheological properties of the ferrofluids.