The high viscosity and low fluidity of heavy crude oil hinder its sorption by conventional porous sorbents, so the efficient clean-up of such heavy crude oil spills is challenging. Recently, Joule heating has been emerging as a new tool to reduce the viscosity of heavy crude oil dramatically. However, this direct-contact heating approach presents a potential risk due to the high voltage applied. To develop a non-contact recovery of viscous crude oil, here, a new approach for the fabrication of a series of ferrimagnetic sponges (FMSs) with hydrophobic porous channels is reported, whose surface can be remotely heated to 120 °C within 10 s under an alternating magnetic field (f = 274 kHz, H = 30 kA m-1 ). Compared with the solar-driven superficial heating, the integral magnetic heating in FMSs can result in a higher internal temperature of the sponges because of the confinement of thermal transport in the porous channels, which contributes to a dramatic decrease in oil viscosity and a significant increase in oil flow into the pores of FMSs. Furthermore, FMSs assembled with a self-priming pump can achieve continuous recovery of viscous crude oil (33.05 g h-1 cm-2 ) via remotely magnetic heating.
Keywords: continuous recovery, environmental remediation; magnetic heating; oil-spill clean-up sponges; viscous crude oil.
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