No abstract

Marine pollution is a critical environmental issue that involves high recovery costs when there are oil spills into the sea. As a response, the Korean Coast Guard has added oil snares as a new category of oil adsorbents. In this study, we introduce a hydrophobic polypropylene-based novel semicircle oil snare with a water repellent coating and studied the applicability of the developed oil snare using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). Moreover, the effects of pH and UV were investigated by changing the contact angle of the prepared materials. The water repellent coating was evenly distributed on the surface of the oil snare with a smaller decrease in contact angle under basic conditions compared to that of the non-water repellent treated oil snare. Lastly, our semicircle oil snare showed nearly 2 times more oil adsorption compared to that of the non-water repellent treated oil snare.