Japanese chemists have devised a gel that swells up to 500 times its size when in contact with solvents, an invention hailed as a breakthrough for absorbing dangerous industrial spills. The jelly-like substance is a successor to polyelectrolyte gels, which expand when in contact with water and are best known in nappies, also called diapers.
Polyelectrolyte gels, though, are useless in tackling organic, or carbon-based, solvents.
Their structure typically collapses because of the aggregation of charged atoms in such compounds, the only exceptions being "polar" solvents that are particularly water-loving.
A team led by Kazuki Sada of Kyushu University found a way around these by adding tetra-alkylammonium tetraphenylborate, a substance that attracts less-polar solvents.
The gel has been successfully tested on carbon tetrachloride, toluene, tetrahydrofuran and other common industrial solvents.
Their work is published online on Sunday by the journal Nature Materials.
Source: Agence France-Presse
